


and impasse and unsayings and the never regrets

by JPlash



Series: Never Regrets 'verse [4]
Category: X-Men: First Class (2011) - Fandom
Genre: Captivity, M/M
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2011-12-30
Updated: 2014-05-05
Packaged: 2017-10-28 12:01:14
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 17
Words: 55,505
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/307666
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/JPlash/pseuds/JPlash
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Erik is at war.  He knows what humanity does to those who are different, and he will not see it happen again.  But Charles...Charles won’t help him. Charles seems intent on fighting him. Charles has to be stopped, and stopping him is simple enough.  He’ll understand, in time. That this is the only way to make him safe, to make them all safe. Even locked in a Peruvian safehouse, though, Charles knows that peace is the only answer.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> This is fic #4 in my Never Regrets 'verse. It should still make sense if you haven't read the others, but you'll probably enjoy it more if you do :)

 

_A linnet in a gilded cage, -_  
 _A linnet on a bough, -_  
 _In frosty winter one might doubt_  
 _Which bird is luckier now._  
 _But let the trees burst out in leaf,_  
 _And nests be on the bough,_  
 _Which linnet is the luckier bird,_  
 _Oh who could doubt it now?_

\-- Christina Georgina Rossetti

**i**

_December, 1962_

“Charles, you’re safe here. And others are safe from you.”

Great glass windows admitting heat; ultra-modern open-plan decor; the sharp lines and angles of the helmet. It fits right in, Charles thinks.

Erik is back in the helmet. Azazel wore it to bring Charles here, Erik somewhere far beyond the range of Charles’s powers, but now, Erik has it back. Azazel brought him here, but not _here_ ; he brought Erik to somewhere outside of Charles’s telepathic range and Erik walked. Charles hasn’t felt another mind in the—twenty-six?—hours he’s been here.

“I’m no danger to anyone and you know it.”

Charles is in his chair, hands idle on the wheels, and Erik’s standing, and they’re both facing the windows but the seven or eight feet between them make clear, from both sides, that they’re not facing that way together.

“Don’t pretend to be more stupid than you are. You took Azazel’s mind, just as you tried to take mine in Cuba. That’s a danger.”

The sun isn’t past its peak yet, so it’s not too blinding, though it’s bright on the water. In the early afternoon, with a clear sky, it’s practically hazardous to look out this window, white light untempered by the haze of cities that don’t exist here, in the midst of a desert. The southern end of Peru, the northern end of the driest desert in the world, the west coast of an unfamiliar continent and the east end of twelve-thousand miles of ocean. A very lovely little house atop a very scenic stretch of cliffs in the middle of absolutely nowhere. There’s a warren of corridors and rooms underneath, underground, as there is beneath almost every property that once belonged to Shaw, but it’s empty.

“You left me no choice, Erik.” But there's no point in rehashing that. Erik would have killed sixty men, not innocent men, but human nonetheless. Charles used Azazel to save them. They're never going to agree on who was right. “I left nothing in Azazel’s mind. There’s no damage. _I_ don’t hurt people. But when you insist on trying to do so…”

“Do you think I’ve forgotten how I first learned you could—impose your will? You don't need me to provoke you. The woman raving about your commanding a man the first day you got involved with the CIA?”

“She wasn’t raving,” Charles contradicts mildly, or perhaps tiredly, then shakes his head in dismissal. “It was a command with no long term consequences and which aligned with his existing desires. He wanted to do it anyway, I allowed him to overlook his impulse to obey poorly conceived orders instead. You cannot tell me you see that as a significant lapse in—”

“To me, no. To the great Charles Xavier, though, infinitely compassionate proponent of unending peace…”

The flat derision in his voice sharpens to almost a sneer as he trails off—not quite, Erik is not that artless, but his opinion is always clear. His opinion is clearer than ever this morning—or rather, Charles thinks, his opinions have hardened, at least regarding Charles.

It is…not as dire as it might have been, but worse than Charles had really believed it would be, for all he’d imagined worst case scenarios. Erik isn’t angry, really, or he is, but it's…muted. Erik isn’t not-forgiving him, as such, so much as…well, taking not-forgetting to an extreme. Charles thwarted Erik’s plan to kill the US and Soviet security officials he’d taken, wiping their memories and having Azazel take them home, as well as sending Erik's newest eight-year-old recruit to Hank and the boys in Westchester. He'd imagined that Erik might be furious beyond reason, might strike out at him, and he’d decided that Erik might hurt him, and that he could cope with that. He’d imagined that Erik might just leave him here to starve, and he’d have to find a way down into the base underneath to radio for help. What he’d really expected, though, was that Erik would appear after a few days and send Charles back to Westchester with furious sentiments about never wanting to lay eyes on him again, but that in time, they’d work things out.

Erik had appeared sooner than that. He hadn’t been furious, or violent, or even all that cold, really, for Erik. But he had been—decided—in a way that Charles hadn’t anticipated.

“Raven is furious,” he’d reported, bizarrely, out of nowhere, “About you taking the boy.” Charles was by the window, awake but not alert—he’d slept in his chair, but the sun had woken him hours before Erik appeared. He was surprised, but not startled. Erik had stood there five seconds, ten, before starting inanely on Raven. “She’s grown rather fond of him,” he continued. “I’ve told her we aren’t taking him back. I don’t want to fight with the boys at Westchester.”

Charles was still too tired for inane conversation. He only really had one thing to say, and he said it. “Send me home, Erik.”

But Erik had actually looked shocked, as much as he ever did, and he’d frowned, and he’d enunciated very clearly, “I can’t, Charles.”

“You can’t?”

“What you did…I can’t have you fighting me.”

And there was a shiver of panic at that, but Charles squashed it, ignored it, remained calm. “What, then? You’ll keep me here forever?”

And Erik had looked out the window, and been entirely decided when he answered—“For as long as it takes.”

And Charles had made himself swallow the new shock of panic and the mental claustrophobia like rising bile.

And now that steady, uncompromising overruling of his right to direct his own life had segued into derision, and it is this that he has never been able to bear from Erik, ‘infinitely compassionate proponent of unending peace’ as though compassion and peace are necessarily childish, foolish, vain things, and that edge of almost a sneer.

Charles purses his lips lightly, watches the junction of ceiling and wall until he is sure there is nothing in him not calm. Only then does he let himself remark quietly, measured, always, eyes open to Erik’s face; “Did you know, my friend, it is hearing you speak that way that hurts me more than anything else?”

Erik’s face shifts minutely; consideration, Charles thinks. “It’s true.”

Charles breathes half of a quiet laugh. “I don’t know that I can claim infinite compassion, but…”

Erik raises an eyebrow, meaning sufficient without any need to repeat the words.

Charles nods simply. Proponent of endless peace. Hyperbolic, but…well. “It is not something of which I am ashamed.”

The colours here are all strong. The edge of the cliff is intensely yellow-brown, almost a dull gold; the thin strip of sand Charles can just see at the base is like cocoa, bowing out into a beach further up the coast. The water is a blue you’d dye silk, out toward the horizon, but closer in, in the shadow of the cliffs and of the house, it’s almost black. The sun is bright, almost overhead, and it stripes the blue in white like burns. It’s December, and this is the southern hemisphere, and it’s hot.

“I’ll go mad here, Erik. I will. I can’t live in isolation.”

“I’ll find a solution.”

“Oh?”

“I’m sure we’re capable of compromise, Charles. I’ll…pay a local to bring tourists to the beach. Spectacular landscape, peace and quiet, bird-watching, maybe. Ordinary humans. Telepathic noise for you. And if you try to use them, if you—have one bring human police out here, say—I’ll kill them.”

Charles has to stare several seconds, Erik’s eyes still out across the water, before he is sure. “You’re serious.”

Erik’s face is not blank, but—smooth. Not confident, but—unworried. “This isn’t a game, Charles.”

“You can’t just _keep_ me here.”

Looking out across the ocean, eyes barely visible past the sharp line of the helmet.

“Yes, I can.”

***

“We know more than we did before.”

“Which is still crap all.”

Hank and Alex are glaring at each other again, and Sean doodles another palm tree on a scrap of paper.

“So what, we just hop an airplane down to Argentina and hope Lensherr hasn’t gone completely psycho? We going to fly you in cargo? Don’t think they let big blue dogs buy seats.”

One of Hank’s fists slowly crushes the corner of the table.

He’s getting better at not doing that. They’re all getting better at this, whatever this is, though Hank has by far the biggest adjustment to get used to. For the others, for Alex and Sean, it’s just…well, hiding, really.

Hiding’s been surprisingly easy. It occurred to Hank a few days after everything blew in Cuba that if the CIA wanted to find them, they could probably just see what property Charles owns and come looking, but when Alex went enquiring after records, none seemed to exist. Maybe the house has always been off the map. Or maybe Charles did something from wherever he is.

Either way, it means hiding has just been sort of weird more than hard. Sean was worried about his family, but when they chased it up it was the same deal as the house. And he didn’t really miss them. He hadn’t seen them in ages anyway, since Charles and Erik had found him, and he’d never really wanted to go back, so. Alex didn’t have anything to go back to. Neither did Hank. Especially not now.

Still, it was—nervous, for a while. They have heaps of money, Charles’s money, so they're cool for food and things. The first time Sean and Alex left the estate to buy groceries, Alex tensed at every other sound and lost it at Sean when they got back, for being loud and conspicuous, though he hadn’t been loud, really.

Now it's been six weeks, and 'til three days ago nothing had happened, and they were sort of just bored.

Until Azazel showed up in the living room with a little kid in tow.

“Something’s gone wrong,” Hank tries again, releasing the table. “The professor wouldn’t have told us where he was if he didn’t want us to help.”

“You haven’t finished rebuilding the jet, we can’t get there.”

“We could just buy tickets,” Sean offers. “With his money. Hank could stay here.”

Hank fumes silently. Alex rolls his eyes. “We’re in hiding. We can’t do passports and stuff. Border security.”

Sean tips his head in resignation, but Hank makes a low sound, a sound he still isn’t used to coming from his throat, too deep, too rough, then “I can fake your passports. You guys could go. I’ll…stay here and look after the kid. Work on the plane.”

This thing is, the teleporter didn’t just bring the kid. He talked, mechanically and slow enough to be a little creepy, and he only stayed a minute, less than a minute, so there wasn’t time for questions or—much sense. It started out obvious enough. He popped into the room while they were playing poker with toffee, everyone freaked out, the kid looked around like he had no idea what was going on, and then Azazel said: “His name is Milton. He is eight years old and has abilities like yours. Charles had me bring him and I should return momentarily with Charles. If not, however, please look after Milton. Teach him to use his gifts. Charles is in Argentina, outside of Villa Gesell, but he will make his way back to you.” And then he disappeared.

It didn't take long to figure out the first thing, that the Professor had made the teleporter do it, not asked him. That explained the weirdness. They’d never seen him do it, mind-control someone, but they knew he could. So maybe they were still fighting, then, the Professor and Shaw's gang? On the beach, it had seemed like the guys from Shaw’s side had switched, but maybe not.

And then they talked to Milton.

Or—they didn’t talk to him straight away, or they did, but not about—everything. He was freaked out and the message had said to look after him, so. They introduced themselves, and asked what his mutant powers were, and told him theirs, and then he asked where he was and they said Charles’s place, and the kid said

“Professor X, right? Is this his school? He said I could learn to do stuff and use my skin and it’d be real good.”

And they all sort of stared, but then Hank nodded, and again, and said “Yeah. Yeah, this is his school. It’s, uh, it’s a boarding school. So, uh—it’s pretty late…why don’t we find a bedroom for you?”

And then Hank took Milton off to find a bedroom, and Alex and Sean freaked out.

Now, three days later, they’ve discovered a few things:

1\. The three of them together are nowhere near as good as the Professor at teaching people to do their thing. Enthusiasm has to count for something, though.  
2\. The webbing in Milton’s hands grows if you push it right. He doesn’t have a clue what pushes it right and neither do they, but they’ve done it twice, and they’re working on it.  
3\. Erik is calling himself Magneto and recruiting people to gather an army in Argentina. Milton isn’t sure what the army’s for, but he says it’s because humans hurt mutants and mutants have to protect each other.

The latter is the most recent discovery and the reason that, with Milton safely tucked up in bed and the hour ticking toward midnight, Hank and Alex and Sean are bent over a table with a few sheets of paper and something that might be a plan.

Alex drops his index finger onto one of the sheets of paper across the table. “Somewhere outside Vill-a Gez-ell. Vi-ya Ge-sell. Whatever it is. How are we even meant to find him?”

“Look?” Hank suggests.

“Yeah, very funny dude, we don’t speak the language, we don’t know how far outside this place…”

“But we should try, shouldn’t we?” Sean quirks a grimace, shrugs. “I mean, it can’t hurt. If we can’t find him, we can just come back…”

Alex huffs a sigh. “Is the concealed thing for my control bit anything like done?”

Hank raises a shaggy, blue eyebrow. “The—” a long suffering sigh. Concealed thing for my control bit. Right. “Give me a couple of days. Two days. Or three. To be sure. And we should test Sean’s again. And passports will take a couple of days.”

“So…we could go on Monday. Fly to Argentina on Monday.” Alex looks around the table like they're all mad, and maybe they are. “Are we sure about this?”

“Beats sitting here,” Sean shrugs.

“I think we owe it to Charles,” Hank murmurs.

***

The next morning, four boys wake on the Xavier estate in Westchester; two of them are blue, one hairy and the other the same pale colour as his bedsheets.

Hank is up before any of the others, working on the details of his most recent project: the control-system he designed for Alex’s suit, but concealable beneath everyday clothes, and with finer control. It’s meant as a defensive weapon—for if the CIA finds them here. Hank’s put a lot of work into finer control, because if Alex has to use it out shopping for groceries, it needs to be able not to hit civilians.

Alex leaves the house early, with a list of materials from Hank. Forging passports needs a few things they don’t have on hand. He walks a good part of the way from the estate, catches a bus part way. He pays for bread with the Professor’s cash at a corner store with a teenage girl behind the register and a mother and little boy choosing sweets and reminds himself that these are normal people and it’s all perfectly safe.

Sean knocks his alarm off its table but rolls out of bed anyway. They're out of bread and Alex is nowhere to be found, but he scrambles some eggs and takes some in to Hank in the lab, then goes upstairs and wakes Milton. The kid is pale blue; he was pale blue on the second day too, but yesterday he was something like the colour of bricks, and the first morning he was as bright red as Azazel. He says sometimes he changes colour when he dreams. It’s pretty cool, but not as cool as flying.

Milton eats eggs for breakfast. It’s super. He’s going to practise changing colour on purpose today, with Sean, who can fly by yelling. He’s got his own bedroom, with curtains and stuff, and eggs for breakfast, and everyone’s really nice, even better than the last place, where everyone was cool but only Mystique was really nice to him. He didn’t get to say bye to her, but Hank says that’s okay, ‘cause he’s at boarding school. Next time he sees her, he’ll be awesome at loads of stuff. ‘Cause now, he’s a proper—student—at Professor X’s school for mutants.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Welcome! :)
> 
> Plans for this fic are a bit freeform at the moment - I was planning to do this part of the story in a few separate under 5K fics, but I seem to have become too used to the long multi-pov serial format, and the plan has changed XD So this might stay T-rated, or it might end up M or E, it might be 10 chapter, it might be 40. We'll see how we go!
> 
> [ETA: I've just (belatedly) changed the rating to explicit, as there are now several chapters that qualify as such; I admit, I'd forgotten it wasn't E-rated already!]
> 
> I very much value everyone's thoughts / am super-easily-swayed, so let me know if you have thoughts on what you do or don't want to see. The general enthusiasm in comments last fic for the boys in Westchester has convinced me to give them a whole lot more screentime this fic than I was planning to, so do be talkative XD (especially re: the boys - first time really writing them, feedback much appreciated!)
> 
> Thanks as always to my fabulous commenters - big thanks to azryal, Kyrene, ettu, Junky and new commenter Madwren for chatting at the end of the last fic <3 And thanks to everyone who's hung out in this 'verse so far, you guys are awesome.
> 
> There will be new year's fic in this 'verse tomorrow!


	2. Chapter 2

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> New chapter! If anyone missed it, I posted a new year's fic in this 'verse; it fits in between the last chapter and this one :) Don't need to read it to make sense, but that's where it slots ;)

**ii**

Argentina was a bust.

The airplane flight was sort of anticlimactic after Hank’s jet. The number of Spanish words they had between them was less than they could manage in awkward gestures. Hank’s passports worked fine, which was good, but.

The Professor wasn’t there.

It took them almost two whole weeks to find the place—an abandoned, or at least empty beer place in the middle of a lot of grass, with, when Alex picked the door, some pretty telltale papers left on a table. Definitely the place. The papers went in the rucksack, then Sean started poking around the front room, and Alex went to poke around out back. No way Lensherr and the Professor and Raven had been living in a bar for coming on two months. Milton had said underground. That meant there had to be a door.

Finding the door took three hours, and Alex had to take off his shirt and blow out half the wall to get it open. Sean cheered.

The base was empty. Lights off, no one home. There were mussed bedsheets, a few cushions on the ground and a massive dent in a wall in a big lounge room in the centre—no one had really cleaned the place up—but it had been emptied. No more papers, no indication of where everyone had gone. Something had gone wrong, something had to have gone wrong, for the Professor not to come, but _what_ …

The place had been emptied of anything useful. Whoever’d done the move out had forgotten to clear out the bar upstairs, though, hadn’t taken the papers left on the table. That was the only way out by foot, so that had to mean they’d all teleported from underground. That was Sean’s deduction, but Alex agreed.

Maybe Shaw’s goons had the Professor and Raven and Lensherr prisoner? It didn’t really seem likely. Someone had obviously stopped the Professor doing his thing, after he’d sent Milton, or they wouldn’t have to be here. But Erik could still rip buildings apart. Even a teleporter would have trouble holding him prisoner. And if Erik had been trying to build an army, like Milton said…

Neither of them really wanted to voice the more likely scenario. Nothing had gone wrong between Shaw’s guys and the rest. If Lensherr was going batshit and building an army, it wouldn’t be Shaw’s guys fighting him, it’d be the Professer. Erik had Raven and the goons on his side, like it had looked in Cuba, and the lot of them had Charles prisoner. Somewhere other than a beer bar in Argentina.

Three weeks after arriving in South America, Sean and Alex flew home—or, rather, to New York. A bunch of buses to Westchester. Home. This was home, now.

It was January—they’d high-fived new years with only limited enthusiasm to a radio count down in Spanish on a long-haul bus back to Buenos Aires—and they walked the two miles from the bus to the estate in the snow, in clothes packed for the Argentinean summer, because Hank can’t leave the estate, he’s too obvious, and Milton’s kind of too young to drive.

Milton ran to the front door with a high pitched yell at their knock, and beat Hank to open it, and wouldn’t let them in until he’d demonstrated that he could now blend into said front door with uncanny accuracy.

Hank made them cocoa, which he wasn’t very good at, but it was hot.

They huddled around the fireplace in the sitting room, and let Milton tell them all the things he was going to be able to do by the end of another year. They weren’t old enough to raise a kid, or to go searching for kidnapped friends in South America, or to have missiles aimed at them by two armies. But you live what you’re given.

It was 1963 now, another year, and if this was life now, then at least they weren’t alone.

***

January.

It’s January, 1963. Late January, in fact.

There are things that January means for Charles, or has meant, at different times. Classes go back at Oxford, the start of Hilary term midmonth, though Charles hasn’t been a coursework student in years and he tutors right through Christmas so it hasn’t been much of a change for him in some time. Before Oxford, January was the heaviest of the snow in Westchester. The man who kept the trees was paid extra over winter to clear the snow every few days, from the paving, and from the road to the parking garage, enough to walk around or to get the car out. The trees were bare and brown in December, then silver with frost, and turned white in January, tottering piles of stacked snow on each branch, silhouettes shifting a little each day. When he was a child, Charles had owned snowshoes, and tried to use them around the estate a few times in a few Januaries. Never as an adult.

In school, January had meant the end of Christmas break, the return to five days of seven sleeping at school, seeing Raven only on weekends and worrying constantly about her during the week, and worrying constantly about himself during the week, and watching every word at school and spending all weekend trying to teach Raven, because her mutation might stop her going to school but it shouldn’t take away her chance to learn. Christmas break was a blessing second only to summer in those years; weeks at home where it could be quiet, sometimes, and where he had only to worry about keeping his words free of Raven’s thoughts, an effort, but nothing like the effort of keeping his words free of the thoughts of two-hundred boys and men at school.

In Peru, January was hot, like December had been hot.

The deck looked out over the ocean; an ocean over which the sun set every night, and sometimes now, through some machination of Erik’s, there were boats just close enough to brush his mind or somewhere down the beach the echo of a thought. It was Erik’s compromise; he wouldn’t deprive Charles completely of his gift, and he trusted that Charles could never bring himself to get an innocent bystander involved, to so bind the will of a passerby. Charles wasn’t sure that trust was warranted, but it would be pointless, regardless—this place was Erik’s, and every room breathed metal now. To get in the door without Erik’s powers would take a significant explosion. For one of the beach tourists to get him out of here in the period between one of Erik’s visits and the next would be near impossible.

Erik doesn’t knock before he comes in. It would be redundant before or after the sound of the door separating itself from the wall. The door used to be just a door, and the wall just a wall. Now, the wall is a slab of steel and the door is a part of it; a small remodelling project before Erik launched his tourism venture down the beach.

Today, Charles doesn’t hear it, the metal sound—his mind is distant, sitting almost dormant in the mind of a young woman right down his end of the beach, just within his reach, toes raking the dark, rough sand, eyes watching the sun beginning to set into the ocean. The van, truck, thing that brings them is parked at the bottom of the dirt road down the cliffs, the man whom Erik pays dozing in the seat. There is an elderly couple today, and the young woman whom Charles occupies, and her fiancé, his arm sweaty despite the dry air and too warm around her shoulders but she doesn’t shift because they’re engaged and the sun is setting over the ocean on the Peruvian coast and the deep satisfaction of sitting in the sand together, leaning into his side, bare shoulders and the skin of his arm, is worth the heat.

“Charles.”

Erik calls his friend's name twice as he crosses to the balcony, always the balcony, because it’s coolest and because it’s closest to the beach and they almost never come closer than the beach. When Charles doesn’t reply, Erik comes outside, comes around in front of the wheelchair, drops to one knee, puts his face in front of Charles’s vacant gaze. “Charles.” He lays one hand atop Charles’s own limp one.

Charles blinks once, twice, and again—then starts, clutches Erik’s wrist with surprising strength, breathes hard for several seconds.

It’s not the first time that Erik has found Charles’s mind wandering, though it is the first time Charles has grabbed him this way on coming back. Sometimes, before, before it all, trekking up and down the continental US together, Erik would come into the motel room or out of the bathroom or even turn to the passenger seat of the car and find Charles gone, body present but mind already with a target, watching, feeling, deciding that yes, this person was worth a visit, and how they should be approached, or sometimes that no, a little boy or girl should be left alone, too young and safe and happy to have them show up on the doorstep.

Erik watches Charles’s eyes, waits until his gaze settles. “Alright?”

Charles is still clutching his arm.

Erik’s skin is relatively cool, and dry, though it’s heated now under Charles’s hand. There’s the tendons under the skin, hard like all of Erik, hard lines, and there’s the intangible thing in between, between one skin and the next, the not-space between Charles’s palm and Erik’s wrist, the contact zone, the pressure of it, the small friction of imperceptible movement, the breath of a body, the presence, and Erik has the rest of a body and a face and a voice but it’s hard for a moment, and another, and seconds passing, to get past that point of contact, of skin on skin on skin.

Erik is watching him from very close, and he asks, and Charles pulls himself out further, out of the touch of skin to a whole body and a voice here, in his throat and on his lips. “...yes. Yes. I’m fine, thank you.”

Erik frowns, and doesn’t move away. “What is it?”

Charles drags the pad of his thumb from the base of Erik’s hand down the soft of his wrist, nothing like as soft as Charles’s own but softer than the callus of the base of Erik's palm. It’s a temptation resisted for weeks, two, or more, and it’s a deep and involving relief now succumbed to, touch, after almost a month with only the occasional shared mental impression of human skin. It was new year, the last time he touched Erik, hand to hand.

“Charles?”

The desire is too deep and too vital to deny for such a small thing as spite. “Touch my face.”

He’s not watching Erik’s face, so he doesn’t know his response, though there’s a soft sound that might be surprise.

Erik complies, though; strong hand, long fingers, massive palm, wrapping around Charles’s jaw, not hard but firm, skin still slightly cooler than Charles’s own, and the texture of fingerprints and the smooth part where there’s a scar below Erik’s little finger and the callus Erik says is from breaking down a gun and the one that’s mostly on the side that just curves round to touch that Charles knows is from spinning that coin in one spot because he’s seen him do it a thousand times, before, before the coin was gone and lodged forever inside Charles’s head.

Skin on skin on skin and the pulse in Erik’s palm and the shift of fingertips and friction that says something is there and this is his body and he is alive, here, in flesh and bone and things that are real and his and not a stolen echo of someone else’s body half a mile away.

Skin on skin on skin and his cheek and his jaw and the bone under his eye and the side of his nose and the side of his neck and it’s a wash of touch Erik’s arm under his hand, moving, then Erik’s hand on his arm, his shoulder, there’s cotton in between but cotton is thin and there’s human warmth through the fabric like the confirmation of a heartbeat and Charles grips what’s in his reach, upper arm and scrabbling with his other hand, and then Erik’s mouth on his own, the warmth of that, skin on skin on skin, and again, beyond words, warmth and skin and _here_ and the deep satisfaction of warmth under his palm through cotton as his hand finds something human—

–and Charles kisses back once, twice, three times furiously, teeth in Erik’s bottom lip, and something, something like letting go—before he can’t.

Charles pulls away sharply, turns his head before Erik can follow. Drops his hands so fast he hits one on the arm of the chair and flinches.

Erik is on one knee in front of the chair, staring, breathing just a little harder than usual.

The spite that Charles feels for Erik is limited; a little more spite today than some other days, a lot less than most days two months ago. It’s enough, though. Too much.

It would be so easy, so much easier to be angry at Erik, for this, for kissing him here, now, because anger would make it so much easier to ignore the substantial part of him that wants to kiss harder and do away with clothes and lie skin to skin for what part of his skin can still feel. It would be irrational, though, to be angry; he asked Erik to touch him, and it is better, now, than it was a minute ago, better far than this afternoon when he withdrew down to the beach.

So Charles isn’t angry, even though it would be easier. He swallows, licks his lips before he talks. “Thank you.”

Erik doesn’t stand, but slowly he sits back on his heels, a little distance between them. “For what?”

Charles’s gaze strays down to the beach, just visible from here, barely. “The things you never think about, Erik, things more human than breathing. The reasons that everyday men go mad in solitary confinement. Oh, I have what I need telepathically, and you give me conversation, but I never imagined how essential touch might be to…identity? I’m not sure.”

Erik waits. He knows this Charles, too, the Charles that retreats into cataloguing, researching, because it’s the best way he has learned to deal with the things that matter, to turn them into projects on which he can act, concepts that he can develop and understand.

“I have been losing my own body, I think.” Charles is thoughtful now, more than anything. The intensity of that desire to touch is subsiding, with speech, with reason and reality, and that leaves only yet another practicality to work around, how to manage this discovered need for human touch for as long as it takes to get out of here. “I haven’t touched another human being since new year. It wasn’t…noticeable, for a week or so, then it was something like an itch, for a while. I realised that my engagement with the visitors to the beach was changing a few days ago, that I was clinging to touch, and…the mind needs human touch to validate its connection to the body, perhaps? There must be existing studies. I’d be interested to know what work has been done, it’s not really anything like my field.” He half-reaches for Erik again, absent-mindedly, before he stops himself. “I wonder.”

Erik is still watching, quietly. “Are you alright now?”

Charles considers the question, and then considers the answer, which is more complicated. He’s not alright. The quiet tugging at his mind, the muted desperation with which he wants to lay Erik’s hand on his shoulder, or his chest, to have the touch of another validate his own body, is not normal and is probably not healthy. It's a lesser thing, now, though, than before; he's satisfied the basic need. And where this ends, if he does reach out, is obvious—Charles has been sleeping with Erik for months, or, more correctly, had been, before, for almost five months, before, but not since the injury, and now…he has thought about it, sex, because he’s twenty-nine not sixty-nine and he’s not a teenager but he is human. He’s not comfortable with it, not here, not like this, can’t be, despite some effort to become so. It’s not that he’s particularly angry with Erik, really, because the things that made him angry two months ago have succumbed to logic, to the fact that Erik is only doing what he thinks he has to do for the greater good. He could be angry at Erik for what he believes is the greater good, but he knows Erik’s mind too well for that, knows too well the places from which the beliefs spring, knows too well the workings of the human mind and the ways in which trauma like Erik’s shapes a man when he lacks the telepathy that has always overruled any other influence in Charles. He can’t _see_ the threads that form Erik’s resolve, not now, not through the helmet, but he has seen them, and Charles does not forget, not anything, not a word in his father’s voice or a dizzying detail of the alcoholic haze in his mother’s mind or a pebble of Raven’s skin or a corner of Erik’s mind.

Charles isn’t angry, not really, and the desire to touch is a thing for which he does not blame himself; a human thing. But he knows where this ends, and he can’t—not while he is, effectively, Erik’s prisoner here, even though it doesn’t matter, even though it isn’t like that. Charles is human, and his mind is not entirely under his control, could never be, would no longer be human in the moment that it was, and it is an irrational discomfort, he believes, this one, but it is one he cannot unseat.

Erik reaches out again, the weight of his hand again on Charles’s own, and Charles shivers, the deep, warm shudder of skin up wrist and tight tendons and tense shoulder and neck and over his skull and down through neck and chest and stomach to where would have been hips and thighs and toes and aren’t. He isn’t okay, but he’s grounded again, bounded again, sure once again in the deep parts of his mind of where the world ends and his body begins, where his body is solid and human and real, and that’s enough for now.

“Charles,” Erik asks again, measured, the transparent intent to impose calm and reason. “Are you alright?”

“Yes,” Charles lies, tiredly and a little reluctantly but easily enough, under the comfort of logic. “Yes, I’m fine now.”

Over the water, the sun is a flat line of red and red and red like nothing else on earth, like the incomparable. Down the coastline, down on the beach, the man whom Erik pays opens the door of the van, bus, truck, thing, and calls out to the four on the beach. The young woman sits up, separates skin from skin.

On Charles’s balcony, Erik watches a moment longer, then stands. “Alright.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Sorry for the week's wait! Found this one a bit tricky. Going away on the 12th, but should have one more chapter up before then :)
> 
> Thank you thank you thank you to Ghanima, Rina, amber, Kyrene and Junky for awesome comments as always; to new commenters beastofeden, Liviania, Aishayan and bikitchi; and especially to azryal and to new commenter professor for picking up things I'd overlooked <3 You guys are all awesome.
> 
> EDIT: Hey guys, not sure that you'll see this but hopefully, if you're looking! A quick note to say that I have not forgotten about this story and that I'm really sorry for the unplanned hiatus! I'm back home from the US but have encountered a block of work in picking a supervisory team for my thesis, thus the lack of reappearance. I'm hoping to be back here in a week or so :) Thanks for the comments and see you all soon <3
> 
> EDIT Nov 2012: Hey folks! So, well, uh, sorry for the *very* long absence :D - I am a terrible person! But believe it or not, the story will be back (somewhat) shortly! I'm working on this fic for NaNoWriMo this year, and I've never yet not finished a NaNo novel, which means that chapters will resume some time in December :)) So if you've just found the story, good timing - and those who were wonderful enough to read a year ago, I hope you'll come back for round 2! <3 Thank you so much!


	3. Chapter 3

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Yes, you are reading correctly, this is an actual new chapter XD Thanks for coming :D <3

**iii**

February is not as hot as January.

This is both saying very little, since January was hellish, and saying everything, since Professor Charles Xavier—not professor, because there is no class to teach on the edge of a Peruvian cliff—has never before spent time and mind dwelling on changes in the weather.

February is not as hot as January—January averaged over 100, and today, Charles estimates, the temperature in the house is perhaps 96. Lower on the balcony, accounting for wind chill, if it can be called chill; higher by the window, where the glass magnifies the heat and some unfriendly god smilingly tries to set him on fire like a wheelchair-bound ant.

His bed is in the living room now, by the balcony, in the flow of air; Eric moved it there weeks ago, when Charles had spent five days sleeping in his chair. In the evening, the sun sets, implacably, and the tourists sigh deeply and kiss on the edge of the waves or hold high what Charles knows is called an ‘Instamatic’ but has never touched with his own fingers, effortless photographs on the edge of the world to be touched reverently with careful fingers in years to come when burning ocean sunsets are a world away.

Charles touches the edges of his own fingers, the veins in his wrists, his collarbones beneath the thin t-shirt he wore to sleep and has not taken off. Some days in February, he knows that burning oceans will never be a world away for him. Today is one of those days, and he presses his palms into the wheels of his chair and turns from the beach and goes to the tiny kitchen behind the bench, where the view isn’t blocked for a standing man but Charles will never stand again. Charles sits behind the bench and the ocean is gone. Charles is an expert now at opening the freezer without awkwardly knocking his chair, and when he pulls out a tray of ice and holds the cubes in his hands so they stick and slide, presses ice into his eyelids then drops a few cubes down his back and doesn’t feel them as they melt at the bottom, Charles closes his eyes and lies in the snow in Westchester, where none of the tourists on the beach have ever been.

One day, the burning ocean and the white light and the dark sand will be a world away. Knowing so is almost absorbing a pastime as estimating the temperature.

***

In snowball fights, neither Sean nor Alex is allowed to use his power, as general consensus ruled in the last week of January that a snowball fight doesn’t work if all the snow is obliterated in the first two minutes. Hank theoretically doesn’t use his either, in solidarity. It’s obviously nonsense, as he can’t make his hands smaller, and he can’t help that his fur makes him fairly impervious to snow, but he doesn’t mention these things. He does not, at least, pelt the snow hard enough to do his friends any real damage. Milton uses his power shamelessly, gleefully, and fully sanctioned. By general consensus, teaching Milton not to change colour is counter-productive. Once upon a time, it might have been their primary goal, Hank knows—to help Milton blend, to send him to school, to make him normal. Milton can never go to school now, however much that irks Hank, because someone would have to take him, or at least put him on a bus, and there would always be questions about Alex’s age, or Sean’s. Someone would have to meet his teachers, and that could never happen, and he’d make friends, and they couldn’t ask him to lie for them, not at his age, not to other little kids. It would be more than just hiding his power; he would have to pretend a family, a home, a life. Better he tell the truth to three boys badly managing attempts at raising him then spend his life lying to the whole world like they had. Like he had, at least. He’s not convinced Sean ever really knew what he could do before Charles and Erik, though Sean would say otherwise. And Alex…well. That ended well. Milton will not have that, for better or worse, not the lies and not the fear and not the friends or the experiences outside the walls of here and now. Milton will be hunted, if anything, the way Hank knows they are still hunted, half-heartedly, because someone has taken most of the wind out of both the CIA and the Russians. That might not be Erik, but the working theory is that it is. Erik is ruthless enough to have done it, however it has been done, they know this, even if they don’t always admit it. Erik is ruthless enough to have hidden Charles from them for months now, and so perhaps he is ruthless enough to do anything. They still haven’t said anything to Milton and one day they may have to, but not today.

Today, Milton is a tree, and no one can see him. Hank knows where he is, because they are on the same team, but the others don’t, and so they are only throwing snow at Hank, who is impervious to snow. Milton becomes a tree when he gets cold, and when he has warmed up a little, he will crawl back to the barricade and huddle behind Hank’s bulk and scoop up massive balls of fresh, dry snow in his webbed hands and pelt them at Alex and Sean from behind Hank’s back, leaning around to throw and then taking cover again. And when he starts to shiver and turn white, and when Alex and Sean are waterlogged and Alex starts to cry foul at Hank and Milton being on the same team, they will trudge inside, Alex melting them a path through the snow back to the door, Hank carrying Milton high on his shoulders, Milton shivering shades of deep blue.

When the snow melts, Hank thinks, then they will think about the CIA again, and the Russians, and how they might have been shut up, and by who. They will talk about where Erik might be, and Charles, and what they should do next.

It’s just on six weeks since Alex and Sean knocked on the door shivering violently with nothing to show for their first commercial plane flight and South America and blowing up walls and searching and hoping and failing to speak Spanish, and it’s almost six weeks since they talked about that.

When the snow melts, they’ll make another plan.

For now, Milton laughs on his shoulders and brushes snow off on his fur, and inside Alex will try to start the fire and might not even blow up the fireplace.

***

In February, Erik sits on the floor if Charles is in his chair, or leans against the rail if Charles is in his chair by the edge of the balcony, or sits with his back very straight on the edge of the mattress if Charles is sitting on the bed. The head of the frame is warped to make that possible, Charles sitting, and for two weeks Charles didn’t use it and Erik could understand that, because even to him who made it, it looks a lot like a cage. But though the break is low enough not to completely disable his core, Charles’s balance is not what it was once, and sitting for more than a minute or two without support for his back is painful and frustrating and not worth the effort. So now, the head of Charles’s bed is a sheet of metal, curved and organic, and he can sit there with his pillows propped up behind him, and save swinging out into his chair, until self-preservation triumphs over inertia and pushes him to eat. If Charles is there when Erik steps through the wall, then Erik comes and sits by him on the edge of the bed, feet firmly on the floor. He does not sit on the bed otherwise, because he is not welcome there, and he understands that well enough.

If Charles is in his chair by the window, then Erik sits cross-legged on the floor, or if Charles has his hands wrapped around the rail of the balcony—and that too has been warped, one long section pressed down to the shoulder-height of a wheelchair—then Erik leans against the rail by him. He puts a hand wordlessly over Charles’s, or, more often, under, lets Charles map thin bones and thick tendons with his fingertips. He brings food, and checks that the water is running, and asks after the tourists on the beach, and Charles answers in single words, because he tries to forget that those people are in some way Erik’s, Erik knows. Erik walks in from the desert, and removes a wall, and enters, and comes to Charles, and puts his hand under Charles’s, and gives him touch, and then gives him food and water and human minds, and then checks the little house for intruders, which takes almost two minutes. In February, Charles doesn’t speak to him, beyond answering questions, and Erik’s life now is things Charles would try to fight. So he comes, and he feels the soft prints of Charles’s fingers, and he leaves again.

When it’s dark, because Charles is only human and the darkness makes a difference, Charles lies on his back in bed and runs his fingertips over his throat, his collarbones, down the sides of his arms. He lies under a sheet because it’s too hot for more and still sweats like a pig, though it’s cool here at night, even in summer. He lies in the dark, eyes half shut so they won’t adjust, and runs his fingers over his own face, brushes fingertips across his lips, his stomach, presses one thumbnail against his left nipple. When he runs his fingers over his hips, over his legs, it’s even a lot like touching another person, because his fingers still feel skin, but it’s one sided, and so very like touching Erik’s hand, running fingers over his arm, in the morning, or the afternoon, every three or four days, a lifeline back out of his mind. When it’s dark, alone, here, on the edge of a desert and the edge of an ocean, Charles lies under his sheet and runs one hand over his chest and one over his numb, motionless thigh like there’s anyone else here and lets himself imagine that Erik touches more than his hand, lets himself remember when he could still get an erection, tries to feel those things like more than an echo, swallows a moan and licks his lips and leaves long red ruts in the skin of his arms and his pecs where his fingernails have been, and thinks of Erik’s hands, and Erik’s shoulders, Erik’s mouth and the feel of him all around and inside, and tries not to feel sick with himself for this, for wanting it, or for having it, or for breathing heavy after, muscles slack, something only very vaguely like an orgasm in ways nothing like what Dr Calker tried to describe to him months ago. In the dark, muscles loose, because he’s only human and the darkness makes a difference, Charles lets tiredness go and whispers—“Erik.” And—“Erik…” and sinks into deep, honest sleep.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> So! Back in business! I've written up to ch23 and outlined the rest of this fic and its follow-up, which is the conclusion of this whole drawn-out series XD As such, I'm going to aim to post a chapter a week. I really hope that some of the fabulous people who read along with 'and then we are beyond the end' a year ago might be up for coming along again - let me know if you're back, I miss you guys!
> 
> As always, everyone please yell comments at me :D
> 
> Now, this story is tagged for captivity, and I know there were a few people reading who had worries about that as a trigger issue. Now that I'm close to finishing the story, I'm going to do some minor spoiling for those people, if you're interested - if you don't want to be spoiled, don't read below :P
> 
>  
> 
> SPOILER:[[Charles will escape successfully by the end of this fic (this installment).]]


	4. Chapter 4

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Big thanks to azryal, avictoriangirl, AGapInMyLife, sakurazukalori, furius, tzzzz and celina for coming back and talking to me last chapter, and to zedille for jumping on board! Comments make the world go round :)

**iv**

“Hank’s machine was an extraordinary accomplishment.”

It is February, but it is late February, and the breeze off the ocean is properly cool for the first time since Charles arrived. The door isn’t shut, but Charles’s chair is by the window instead of by the door, Charles dressed for the heat still baking in the air rather than the almost-chill in the breeze. Erik’s back is against the window, the glass, not too hot to touch today, his knees drawn up a little, forearms resting on knees, idly pulling out and then replacing each of the eyelets in Charles’s shoe.

Charles doesn’t frown, doesn’t raise an eyebrow, but his eyes narrow a little and Erik knows he’s caught, or about to be. He didn’t expect any less. “Yes,” Charles agrees, then adds, “Cerebro,” and it’s just a little touched, just a little intimate, or something like it, though Charles was only in the thing once.

“The ability to find mutants more efficiently…would be tremendously powerful. We could do a great deal of good. It’s unfortunate that the machine was destroyed.” It’s the first he’s asked anything specific of Charles since Charles betrayed him, since he imprisoned Charles, and Erik doesn’t think highly of his chances. Even so, it’s too important not to ask, even if Charles is just as likely to stop talking to him altogether.

“Indeed,” Charles offers impassively. There is the edge of a frown on his lips now, though Erik doesn’t think he means to show it. Then, Charles doesn’t generally go out of his way to hide things from Erik.

“It should be possible to rebuild the machine.”

There’s no point trying to wind Charles up to it any further. Charles must know what Erik wants, and pretending otherwise would be obnoxious. 

Charles appears to think otherwise. “Were Hank to agree with you, certainly. He doesn’t, however.”

Erik does not grit his teeth.

Charles raises an eyebrow, arch and _sad_ and infuriating. “It will not help you in the end to alienate your friends, Erik. You want my help, and you want Hank’s, but you refuse to consider that our advice might be more broadly worthwhile.”

“I consider what you say Charles; I don’t agree with it.”

“And I won’t help you.”

“People like us get hurt. Are getting hurt, as we sit here. I know you don’t object to those people being found and told the truth.”

“That depends on the truth that they are told.”

Erik craves, as he sometimes does, the coin that is not between his fingers—a simple thing to fight. He hates himself for it. He hates them both, and everything around them. “You’re a hypocrite,” he tells Charles, and it’s true, it’s true and infuriating and Erik is so sick of this. “You talk about peace, and you claim to be interested in protecting people, Charles, but you’re happy to see your people suffer because you think it will protect humanity. Peace is not what we have.” Gunshots and missiles and mistrust and pain and fear and death. “I don’t need you to operate the machine,” he reasons. “Emma Frost can do that. You’re the only person who can fix it, though, besides Hank.” It is a fine line to tread between reminding Charles that Cerebro is not a machine of violence, and trying not to remind him that violence is necessarily going to happen. It’s Charles who’s good at this, not Erik, but Erik has to try. “What could be so important that you will not help me find children like the little boy with the skin—Milton? Children like Sean, like Raven, like us, Charles? Why are those people less important to you?”

Charles rolls his shoulders, most of the only way he can really shift much in his chair without exerting a lot of effort. He is frowning in earnest now, out the window. “I will not change my mind, my friend. Not until you change yours.” He looks down at Erik, leaning back against the window, tense and ever ready to spring, the ocean behind his back. There is something in him that settles, something that is, at least, sure of Erik, and sure of himself. “I know what I believe.”

His face composes itself as it increasingly remains—not quite smiling but not distressed; accepting, almost. Acceptance, perhaps is the inevitable consequence of comfortable powerlessness. He almost believes it.

Erik is laughing, or doing what passes for laughing for Erik, under his breath, lips pressed tightly shut, no true humour in him. “I know, Charles…” another beat of slightly nauseating not-mirth. “If you didn’t, you would have—” a sharp breath out, a chuckle less distorted, more resigned. “By now.”

Charles holds his gaze steadily, though Erik’s eyes are elsewhere, anywhere else, then for a moment, and another, and another—and Erik looks away again, rising from the carpet, powerful thighs, taking a few deliberate steps toward the sofa. “No, Charles, you have never attempted to delude me or anyone else in that regard. You are and always will be Charles Xavier, utterly incomprehensible and—“ the intake of breath, the line between frustration and awe—“remarkably unchangeable.”

They lapse into silence for ten seconds, twenty, thirty, longer, while Erik perches on the arm of the couch and Charles attempts to decide whether he truly wishes to ask. He does, of course, and he should have known that; it is what he has with Erik, what he had from the start, maybe—they lie to themselves when they want to, but Charles has made very certain, or had, they do not hide from each other, not unless it is together.

He pushes the chair back from the window, turns it with one hand on one wheel, almost not awkward now. It ‘s not ever been often that Charles has found it difficult to meet someone’s eye, and the sudden desire to watch the skirting board as he asks convinces him only that eye contact is more essential than ever. He waits until Erik feels his gaze and looks down at Charles to ask—“Why did you bring me here, my friend, if you knew I wouldn’t change? Why do you keep me here if you know I will not?”

The verbs are softer by far than those he could have chosen—abduct, force, imprison—and it is softened further, softened more than both of them know Erik deserves, because it is a genuine question, as almost all of Charles’s questions are.

Erik’s face tightens too sharply all the same, the convulsive, manic rage that lives beneath the surface of his mind, that Charles has seen define all the edges of his world.

Charles waits.

Erik looks away. “There is a world outside the walls of your skull, Charles, where your pretty hopes are torn down by every man and woman and their casual cruelty, and the fleets of humanity’s—” he speaks the word with disgust, more every day, and more, and it makes Charles nauseous—“two greatest nations resolutely trying to kill you did not open your eyes to it.”

He glares back at Charles a moment as though hopeful against all hope that Charles might suddenly grasp his logic—then looks away again, teeth grit tight. “What options do you leave me, Charles? What would you have me do?” It isn’t a question. His gaze swings back to Charles’s face like fine steel pliers, a functional, precise thing, and Charles knows, with a guilty comfort somewhere deep beneath his ribcage, that he is the only person who has never quailed under that look.

Erik’s voice is as hard. “You don’t exist in the real world, you don’t think in the real world, and if you actually believe—” he cuts himself off, schools his expression, breathes out.

He looks Charles in the eye properly, open, almost, the precision surgical tool of his stare gone in favour of fire, fire and ash, the endless, atom bomb look that first gave Charles the desperate, unfulfillable need to kiss this man in the choppy waters of a godforsaken harbour as a submarine sank away below and beyond them.

Charles looks back, and waits, and doesn’t hide his disappointment when Erik looks away. That look is not a kiss anymore but it is honesty, real honesty, the things they choose to step around to make their impasse bearable, to forget that it is not an impasse but a caging.

Erik’s voice is all frustration now, only frustration, the flat, dispassionate kind that has long since given up. “You’re like a child who runs into the street before approaching tanks.”

Charles smiles thinly, humourlessly. “And you, my friend, are the child that crushes every butterfly lest it bear relation to a bee, then breaks the neck of every bird lest it swoop, then breaks the arm of every boy lest he strike, and then takes the world in his hand and crushes it until he can say it is as ugly as he imagined.”

Erik stands.

Charles drops the last remnants of the not-smile from his lips. “I will never condone your war, my friend. Not if you keep me in this place until I lose all my hair and we both are infinitely older than we ever imagined we could be.”

Erik’s face back, turned back from the wall, and Charles can almost read in his face what he is still barely a whit more used to not hearing from his mind: the edges of imagining, trying to see age and years in his smooth face, the way that only Charles has ever really beguiled him to imagine anything.

Then Erik’s gaze slides away, sleek and efficient, the painless edges that let Charles know every day that as the months roll on that walled-off mind is becoming more sharp, not less – sharp like a razor with no handle and all sides blades, unable to cut through the bad without shredding all the good as well.

Erik’s voice is impassive: “By then, the war may be won.”

“I hope not.”

Charles is as honest as he has been almost always with Erik, and his eyes are as open and as unashamedly waiting to be met as the first time they talked this way, in a rented car in the third state in a week searching for mutants, and the fiftieth, in Charles’s study at the manor in Westchester, and every time since.

Erik doesn’t look as he opens the not-door, and doesn’t look before he closes the wall behind him.

Charles wonders, occasionally, whether Erik sometimes deludes himself that Charles doesn’t want him to lose.

***

In the last week of February, Milton comes screaming past Hank’s window and through the front door, his skin perfectly contoured in grey and white like snowbanks, his much-too-large green t-shirt pelting bodiless through the air. Sometimes, Milton can control his clothing. Now is not one of those times.

“Alex!”

Milton knows he’s not to disturb Hank when he’s working, though he only remembers that maybe half of the time.

“Aleeeeeeeeex!”

The yell gets louder and then softer again, and tiny running footsteps pass the door of the lab and then hurtle on down the corridor. Alex is out with Sean getting groceries, and Milton knows this, Hank is sure, but the kid is only eight and he forgets. Sure enough, ten seconds later footsteps skid to a halt halfway across the other side of the house and head back in his direction.

“Beeeeeeast!”

The name still makes Hank groan a little, but it makes Milton happy to use codenames, like it makes Milton happy to think this is a boarding school, and Hank has had to admit there is a shaky sense in it—he’s not sure the CIA is likely to be looking for ‘Hank, Alex and Sean’ so much as for ‘a blue guy, a redhead and a kid shooting lasers from his chest’—but if their names are around somewhere, then codenames are a start at precautions.

“I’m coming in!” Milton’s little voice bellows from outside the heavy door of the lab before it swings open, not waiting for a reply, which Hank will have to lecture him about again later, because one day the kid is going to blow in at the wrong moment and end up with acid burns or half his face blown off.

Hank looks up from the glider wing he’s darning, a long rip where Sean had another unexpected meeting with a tree. “What do we do before entering the lab?”

Milton has his little hands on his little knees, bent over and breathing heavy, making him shorter than Hank’s workbench. “Knock!” he yells perfunctorily, then pants a few more heavy breaths. “But there are people!”

Milton is over at the window a moment later, nose pressed to the glass, and Hank leaves the mending to follow. “People on the estate?”

“Yeah! Three! You said to always tell someone if there’s people!”

People on the estate could be nothing. It could be the post, though there’s been no post yet—but there must be people with Charles’s address. It could be someone from town, driving past and seeing Milton in the yard through the gate and coming to say hello. Harmless. It could be an old friend of Charles’s, perhaps, or a distant relation. It could be a local historian interested in the estate, or a religious missionary going door to door, or someone selling steak knives.

Hank pulls Milton back from the window with one heavy, thick skinned blue hand on his tiny shoulder, and heads for the lockdown button by the worktable. It could be a census worker, or a passer-by, or a tree enthusiast—or it could be the CIA, or the Russians, or any of the dozen other intelligence agencies that he’s reasonably sure now are at least making motions toward being after them. “Did they see you?”

Milton is under the workbench, and Hank drops to one knee, one hand hovering near the big red button that Milton pushed once just because it’s big and red and he’s a small boy. He looks like any other tiny human boy—and he is a tiny human boy, for all the difference of webbed feet and strange skin. Milton’s skin is hardly ever this colour anymore, ‘normal’, and Hank wonders in a corner of his mind whether Milton’s scared and that’s suppressing his ability, and files that away because if it is what’s happening, then they need to work on that. He’s nodding his head, messy shag of curls that probably need a cut falling down over his eyes.

Hank glances out the window again, deliberating—better to close the blind now and ensure they’re not seen, or leave it open and leave himself a sightline? “They saw you, but didn’t chase you?”

Milton licks his lips, barely panting now—straightens a little and bumps his head on the table. “Ow. They—“ He rubs his head hard, and flinches again. “They tried to chase me. Their legs are too short but. Not as tall as me. And I shut the door behind me.”

The boy is grinning proudly, deeply satisfied at his height, or at having thought to shut the door, or possibly at both.

Hank frowns. “The three people are shorter than you?”

“Mmmmmhm.”

Hank eases back up onto his feet. “How old are they?”

Milton purses his lips, scrunches up his face in deep consideration. “I don’ know…one’s really lil’ I think, litt’ler than me, like five or something? And the other two like me, I think, or maybe a bit smaller, ‘cause they were all shorter than me, and they couldn’t run as good in snow.” A nod of finality. “Yeah. Yeah, I think.”

Hank takes a step back from the bench, and another, and glances once more out the window. “There are three children in the yard.”

“Yep. I came straight away, like you always say! So I think they’re still there.” Milton has ducked his head out from under the table, following his teacher’s lead.

Hank fixes him with his most teacherly stare—which is getting more teacherly, he thinks, if slowly. “You’re sure they’re children?”

“I think?”

“Did they say anything?”

“Ummmmm….”

“Milton.”

“I was running?”

Hank rubs one hand across his face. “Okay. Okay, look, Milton—I need you to stay here, okay? I’m going to lock down the lab, and you’re going to be safe in here.”

“They might be bad people, do you think?”

The glee in his voice is discouraging—Hank is pretty sure that Milton has an entirely skewed understanding of the little power he, Alex and Sean could collectively muster to protect themselves. He considers, then returns to the table and presses the boy back down to the ground with a hand on his shoulder. “They’re probably fine. But just in case, I’m going to lock you in here, and you’re going to stay under the table and be very quiet. Can you do that?”

Eager nodding. “Can I push the button?”

And for all his attempts at discipline and teacherliness and properly-raising-a-child (and what does that even mean?), Hank’s lips twitch. “Yeah kid. Yeah, you can press the button. Once I’m out of the room, okay?”

The sound of metal shutters clacking into immovable place behind him is very little comfort. Three kids is not the CIA, or the Russians, but it’s the end of February and Hank has known for more than two months that those are not their only enemies. Somewhere in the world, maybe South America or maybe somewhere else entirely, Erik is almost certainly keeping the Professor from coming back to them. Gathering an army. Out of his mind. And it’s hard to imagine Erik as an enemy, but it’s impossible to imagine Erik betraying the Professor, and that has become an unavoidable piece of fact. If only Alex and Sean were here. Hank can’t fight kids. But Erik would know that, knows that he and Alex and Sean wouldn’t hurt kids, he knows all of them too well. Alex killed his first man, mistakenly, before he was six. Hank can’t fight kids, but that doesn’t mean that kids can’t fight him, if they’re Erik’s kids. If they’re Erik’s army.

Behind him, barely audible through the heavy metal, Milton’s tiny voice yells, “I pressed the button!” As though Hank might have missed the clang of deadbolts and extra, metal-free barriers locking into place. Those are new and inadequate and still in progress, but Hank’s trying.

Alex and Sean are not here, and there is no knowing when they’ll be back, and there is an insistent knocking on the front door.

Hank swallows thickly, and pulls the zip of his armoured suit up to cover his neck, and goes to face whatever ‘Magneto’ has found to throw at them.


	5. Chapter 5

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Sorry this one's a day late!

**v**

Charles counts the days using the clock, which is not an efficient method of date-keeping but works well enough. He has not had to ask the date since the second week here—this time here—as though the number of weeks here might be more bearable if he discounts the weeks before being here stopped being any part his choice, before he freed Erik’s prisoners, even just before he threw himself down the stairwell in his hopeless attempt at the door, before the door was gone. He tries to think of it as a mercy, the door being gone—he would be tempted to try again, for pride’s sake, and reason tells him he would fail again, and perhaps not be as lucky this time.Charles has a sheet of paper on the table by his bed, with numbers in his small, neat hand for each day. Erik looks at it—picks it up, turns it over, checks it for God knows what—and asks, “Would you like a calendar?”

Charles swallows. His voice is disused and old and thin and someone else he doesn’t know, or knows too well. “It’s almost March now.”

“Your counting is accurate.”

“I’m a scientist.”

Erik nods impassively. “I’ll bring you a calendar.”

***

There is a clock and calendar on the wall of the lab in Charles’s childhood home in Westchester, put there by him as a young teenager when he liked to spend hours, days in there, working. The visible part is a row of hard plastic plates on an electronic axle, wired to an actual clock hidden in the wall, flipping over minutes, hours, days, months—Charles had trusted himself to be able to count the year himself. More recently, Hank has kept his time by it, working at Charles’s benches on things Charles never dreamed of, marking the passing of midnights. At this particular midnight, every flag changes: month two to three, and so on—3-1-00-00.

They make a quiet slipping sound as they flip, not enough for the minutes to annoy as they pass. This particular midnight, no one is there to hear it.

***

Erik stands behind the wheelchair, hands far enough forward on the grips that the backs of his fingers almost touch the shoulders of Charles’ shirt. Charles can feel the warmth of the almost-touch, just—losing sensation in half the surface of his skin has heightened it in what remains. Not equally, by any measure, but somewhat.

Erik nearly always stands behind him, and there are probably several reasons, but the main one is as mutually acknowledged as it is futile: the helmet is an ugly, stupid, cruel thing, and the man who wears the helmet is not Erik but Magneto, not Charles’ Erik but the man who hopes that before they are old men humanity will be at the very least thoroughly subjugated. It is a pointless gesture. Charles’ Erik had a human mind to wrap around and into, the shift of thought and feeling like water, deep water hiding rocks and knives and fierce tides but also life and bright things that Charles insistently keeps whole in his memory.

The sun is Valencia and goldenrod melting into the ocean. Erik breathes out quietly and Charles knows he will speak now because with no living mind to breathe alongside, knowing every detail of what he can see and hear is all that keeps Charles sane.

Charles thinks he can almost feel Erik’s hands tighten on the wheelchair behind his shoulders. His voice is very quiet, low. “If I could build your utopia, Charles, I would.”

Charles shuts his eyes and breathes out slowly, quietly. The last light of the day makes his eyelids red.

“If it were in my power, I would build your perfect world around you just so I could be as bewildered by you every day as I was when you pulled me from the ocean.”

It is not a new sentiment, and Charles understands it as it is meant; not the bewilderment at a stranger grasping Erik in the water but the wondering incomprehension that Charles used to see in him, very often at the start—the not-disgusted confusion that he still catches just very occasionally in his friend’s eyes, that says for all he will not try to understand Charles’ vast investment of hope in the world, he nonetheless, despite himself, sometimes finds it beautiful, or—or at least finds Charles beautiful, and that part of him with the rest.

***

Hank opens the door just a crack. It’s a foolish precaution, probably, because if there’s a little mini-Alex waiting on the other side, he’s probably fucked regardless.

Nothing happens—for a moment. Then—“Hello?”

There is a tiny face in the crack of the door, not quite pressing through but making itself known. The tiny face squints, then—“You’re the blue one!”

Hank blinks.

“Can we come in?”

Not the tiny face in the door, but another equally tiny voice from behind. Hank opens the door a little further.

There are indeed three of them, two boys and a girl, and they’re not really dressed for snow.

“…Hi.”

The littlest boy shivers. Hank tries to remember that the small children could be here to attack. “Where have you come from?”

The first one again, pretty clearly trying to look brave. “Magneto said to tell you we’re here to come to school.”

Hank no longer has the type of eyebrows that shoot to a hairline (nor a hairline, as such), but the impression is much the same. “Magneto said…okay.”

“We’re mutants. This is the mutant school, right?”

“Um.” Hank tries to think logically. Clearly, someone in South America—or wherever, is tossing around this school idea. He’s pretty sure that Milton got it from Charles, so possibly this is another message from Charles—but these kids aren’t mentioning Charles. Still, if they’re here to attack anyone—well, the door has been open for almost a minute.

The littlest one is starting to look rather blue—in the entirely human way—and Hank makes a decision. “Right. Come in. Come in, come on, out of the cold—“ he steps back from the door, waves them in. “Come on, I’ll start a fire.”

***

It is the third day of March when Erik brings a desk calendar with pages to rip off for every day.

Charles is worried, briefly, that if he rips a page every morning he may snap and rip everything in reach. There is not much in reach, though, that is not metal—there is not a lot he could break. Instead, he flips the pages with a thumb before placing it on the table by the bed. “What should I write in it?”

Erik’s face doesn’t move. “What did you write on your piece of paper?”

“The date.”

Charles is in his chair and Erik lowers himself to the floor, effortless, able and agile and steel under skin and Charles is fiercely jealous, always. Erik leans back against the side of the bed, crosses his long legs, places his left hand on the right arm of the chair, thoughtless, now. Charles pauses before he touches, but only the way he pauses before he eats, or drinks, or opens his eyes in the morning. He has little enough of his body left, and if touch is a human necessity, then so be it. There is no heat left in the touch—not really—and Charles mostly ignores that there is comfort.

Erik spins a shapeless thing of metal above his other palm and that too, Charles supposes, is thoughtless. “You’re a brilliant man. Think of something.”

Charles briefly considers cursing him ten ways to Sunday, but he is so, so tired today, and he somewhat thinks that if he lets himself feel that much right now, he may let himself fall into Erik’s arms and sob himself unconscious. Instead, he watches the horizon. “I have a submission deadline in two days time. Another eight days later, and then another on April twenty…sixth. Little use writing them down, I think.”

Erik ignores him. Charles resists the very strong urge to dig in his fingernails.

***

With a fire started, and with Milton still locked safely in the lab, and with the three kids on the rug with fingers and toes dangerously close to the fire, Hank settles himself on the couch, trying to feel like that gives him some authority. “So, you’re here to come to school.”

The kids look normal enough—really normal. Not like Milton, who looked fairly normal but sometimes unintentionally changed colour, but totally normal, like they could go to an actual school and not attract attention.

“Mmhm,” confirms the little ringleader, his tone of leaderly authority a little softened by the thawing process. “Mystique said she’s checked us out enough for us to go to school now.”

Mystique. Hank looks into the fire. “You’ve been staying with Mystique? And Magneto?”

“But they said we’re ready to come to school now.”

“Right. Of course.”

“Elliot’s only been around since the other day but I think they didn’t have to check him as much ‘cause he’s so little.”

“Right. Who else have you been staying with?”

“Huh?”

Hank internally kicks himself—the boy probably thinks Hank’s in contact with Raven and Lensherr and co. He clears his throat, mostly to stall. “I have to test, you see. Check that it’s really you. Not a—shapeshifter.”

The kid frowns a minute, then the little girl grins, “Like Mystique!”

And the littlest one pipes up, “She looks like A-zi-zi sometimes, and does silly things! But she can’t take you places!”

And, “It’s Azazel,” the older boy corrects, an affected tone of patient superiority, the way that children that age will do. Then he turns back to Hank, and answers, dutifully—“Well, Azazel, obviously, and Riptide, and Roulette, and—the pink one, and…three other people? Or maybe four? But we didn’t meet everyone.”

Hank nods what he hopes is approvingly. He wants to ask about Charles, rather desperately, but he doesn’t want to put the kids offside—and how do you justify asking whether anyone was in a wheelchair when you’re supposed to know the people in question? Besides, Charles was in a wheelchair when he sent Milton, but he might be walking again now—it does seem a long shot, but Hank isn’t giving up on the Professor.

Those are worries for another time, though. “So you’re going to stay here, now?”

“Mystique said we can go to school now!” The little girl seems enamoured of the idea—Hank wonders what exactly Raven told her.

“Well…this is a boarding school,” Hank falls back on the story they’re still telling Milton. “So you’ll have to live here.”

“We know that.”

The little girl elbows her fellow for that, and he scowls.

Hank tries not very hard not to smile. “And your name is?”

“Declan. And this is Alisha, and he’s Elliot.” The littlest one waves his fingers clumsily.

Hank raises a hand awkwardly and makes a poor attempt at waving back. He wants to be clear before he brings Milton out of safety. “You won’t be able to see Mystique or the others again, not for a long time.”

Alisha nods very earnestly. “I’m going to miss her, ‘cause she’s really nice. But she’s busy doing important things. So we have to come here now.”

“And try hard and get strong,” Declan adds. “So we can be helpful and not get hurt.”

Hank swallows. Building an army, and ‘get strong’, and whatever has happened to Charles. But these are children, and madness or not, he—and Sean and Alex, god help them all—are apparently the only people to look after them. “Right. Well.” He stands from the couch, and at his feet the children are so, so tiny. Where do they come from? What have their lives been, that they could end up not even eight years old and in the hands of whatever madness Lensherr is orchestrating? Somewhere in several uneasy parts of all Hank’s fear at all of this, the imagined memory of tiny little Alex and a charred corpse floats like all the ways that everything here could go so wrong.

The children look up at him, heads bent all the way backwards.

Hank takes a deep breath. “Right. Don’t go anywhere. I’ll be back in a minute with our other student.”

Twenty minutes later by the fire, Hank back on the couch, Milton and Declan stretching on their toes to be taller than one another remind Hank remarkably of Alex and Sean except that no one is dead yet, not for these children. Hank stitches the end of the tear in Sean’s wing, and pretends not to watch the kids posture at each other. A school, then. Well. If he can never leave the estate again, there could be worse ways to spend his life.

***

Charles’s hands rest once more atop one another in his lap when Erik says “Publication deadlines?”

Charles is far out to sea, straining, because the boat is well beyond his range, or would have been, not long ago. He is there, so it is the edge of his range now, he supposes.

Charles’s hand feels very fragile beneath Erik’s palm. “Charles.”

For a moment, Charles is aware but staying away, and then he breathes out, on “Mmmm?”

Erik gives him a moment, waits for his eyes to refocus. “Your submission deadlines. They’re publication deadlines?”

Charles’s gaze is sharp. “They were.”

“You only need post, then.”

Charles releases his breath very slowly, and feels in the tips of his fingers that most things here are metal, but he could try to rip Erik’s flesh.

“Charles?”

“Is there a point to this, Erik?”

Erik moves his mouth in a way that Charles has long since learned to read as a shrug. “I don’t know whether two days is enough for you to write—whatever it is you want to publish—but I can’t imagine that April is too soon?”

“And you would allow me to send post.”

“I have a teleporter, Charles. It’s no great effort to find a post office.”

Charles’s intake of breath is very small—the change in his face smaller. “You would send my article for publication?”

“Of course.”

“But…” Charles’s eyes are properly wide now, not in that way that they were, all the time, again and again, when Erik met him, not so wondering, but hopeful, at least, a little, and surprised, in a good way, and the grey thing that is there now day in and day out is less grey, a little.

“I don’t try to make your life difficult. You know that.”

“What if I write a message to the police?”

“I’ll read it before I send it.”

Charles leans forward a little in his chair—turns it a little, even, toward Erik and not away. “Why? What could possibly be in this for you?”

If that makes Erik’s chest feel just a little more hollow, it’s nothing he’s unused to. There are a handful of ways he could respond—he was selfish when he met Charles, but not since Cuba—does Charles not know him better than that, helmet or no?—that there could be plenty in it for him, if it makes Charles move from his own bedside and mutter under his breath things that Erik only half understands and love something, even some abstract concept, the way Erik has never seen anyone else but his mother love—but those are all things that are emotion, and he won’t ask that of Charles anymore. He says “I’m not an unreasonable man, Charles.”

That elicits a very small laugh, which is something, at least—commonplace two months ago, but not for some time now. “Really?”

“I sent three children to your estate last week.”

It’s an impulsive admission—Charles has always made him impulsive, and it’s not even really surprising anymore.

Charles disagrees—Charles’s eyes are wide again, concentration on his face that would make Erik afraid and thrilled and terrified were he not wearing the helmet. “Why?”

“The boys are living there. Hank and Alex and Sean. I told you months ago that I left little Milton with them. I’ve had three more children respond to our advertisements, and my camp is no place for children. You were right about that.”

Charles breathes in—hovers—breathes shakily out.

“It’s a compromise—I imagine that the boys are probably indoctrinating the children the way you did them—but I am told they have been taking good care of the little boy, and helping him with his abilities. I want that for these children. We both do.”

Charles looks down at his hands—looks at something past Erik’s right shoulder. “Yes.”

“I don’t really want more people who think like you, but I won’t make children soldiers, either. It’s a compromise.”

“You’ve never been good at compromise.” But his voice is softer.

“I played along with your CIA plan for half a year.”

“It was a good plan.”

“Still a compromise.”

“We helped you to get Shaw.”

“You know I would have done it myself.”

“It’s why you ‘played along’.”

Erik smiles, just a little. “Do you think so?”

Charles meets his eyes, properly, almost openly, like he hasn’t in months. “You’ve sent all the children who’ve come to you to the boys.”

“I have.”

“And you haven’t harassed them to join your ‘army’.”

Another very small smile. “I’d say I’m not a monster, but…”

Charles sighs quietly. “You’re not a monster, Erik.”

Half a laugh, surprise, mostly. “I wasn’t asking for that.”

“You never do.” Charles looks up again, not so much hopeful now but wondering, wondering in his beautiful impossible way, like birds migrating south and what Erik imagines children feel, when they’re too small to know better. “Why didn’t you tell me?”

Erik raises an eyebrow. “I’m not looking for your gratitude. You have every right to hate me. I won’t come here looking for anything else.”

“That’s awful logic.”

“You would know.”

It’s almost strange, the way that none of Charles’s expressions have changed, just inverted—as though before, he could be ten thousand variations of joyous, and now he steps through the same ten thousand versions of such a very deep, very simple sadness that Erik knows he must know Charles better now.

Charles shakes his head, and it’s that sadness, and wonder, and a little fear, and something terrifyingly like love. “I don’t hate you.”

“It wouldn’t make you a bad person.”

“It would make me a very sensible person, I suspect.”

Erik doesn’t disagree.

“Thank you. For looking after the children.” Charles reaches out his right hand, and this time he does dig in his fingernails, for a moment, and then lifts Erik’s hand until he can hold it in both of his own.

Erik stares at his own fist. “I told you.”

“You’re not looking for my gratitude. I know.” And Charles lifts Erik’s hopeless, predictable fist to his lips and quietly kisses the side of it, the curl of finger around thumb, and Erik’s skin feels so exactly the same on his lips as it did and has and hasn’t in such a long time, and that really shouldn’t be surprising. “You just do what you think is right.”

Erik is making a fair effort at looking out the window. “I do what I have to do to protect our people.”

Charles shakes his head, for no real reason, really, rationally. “Come here.”

Erik looks at him, at least.

“I’m so tired, Erik. Hold me. Please.”

“Charles—“

“Is that too much to ask?”

The lump of Erik’s throat bobs under thin skin.

“I’m angry at you. I’ve been angry at you for months.” A smile that is less sad than—tired, yes. “I don’t think that actually matters.”

Erik rolls from the ground onto his knees. “What do you…?”

A self-conscious shrug, a more self-conscious burst of laughter. “I want—the muscles in your shoulders. I want not to see anything. I want to—not to have to hold my back up. You can’t imagine how _hard_ it is, now, staying upright.”

Erik nods, frowning now. “I can try to modify your chair—“

“No.” Charles _looks_ , hard, until his—friend, still, maybe—looks back. “No. I want you to hold me. Unless you won’t.”

And Erik doesn’t look away, but he shuffles forward, awkwardly, for Erik, still on his knees, and Charles is mostly facing him, and it’s not far, to kneel with Charles’s knees to Erik’s chest. Erik rests one hand there, awkwardly, then the other. “Join me. Properly. Willingly.”

Charles shakes his head, once, then—“No.” Just in case. To be sure, that there’s no confusion.

And Erik’s face hardens, the tiniest bit, and he is sad in a fresh, sharp way where Charles is only sad in a very tired way that is starting to feel older than months. But when Charles doesn’t look away, Erik reaches out, one hand and then the other from knees to run a thumb along a shoulder, curl a hand around a bicep, and it is laboured, hard, for Charles to drag himself forward with his elbows, to the edge of his chair, but then—but then he can fall forward, know that Erik will catch his weight, because Erik has always caught his weight— _except for once, on the beach, in Cuba—and twice, crashing down the stairs and crashing again and again until nothing—and here by the window, crashing into the sea with all the force of how is he supposed to know what to do now, how, twenty-nine and so tired?_ —but Erik’s chest is as solid as ever, the muscles in his shoulders and when Charles rests his head there, sees nothing in the crook of Erik’s neck and shoulder, when Erik’s arm comes around his back, when Erik’s lips move in his hair and everything is still and quiet and he lets go every muscle and breathes into Erik’s heartbeat—then Erik holds him, and for a moment, and another moment, and just a little while—it’s almost like not being tired anymore, and almost like being happy—

—and everything, terribly, wonderfully, impossibly like love, again, always.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thanks to sakurazukalori, spoonring and tzzzz for comments last chapter, and big thanks to zedille for picking up some errors for me and chatting about Erik's own special crazy :))


	6. Chapter 6

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> So Xmas and New Year happened? But I'm still here! Just took me a few weeks! I promise I'm not disappearing again 8'D *not very good at being on track* DX It feels sort of weird writing all of this...everyone just sort of waiting and getting by. Like the plot has to almost crawl to a stop before it can get going again. But I guess that's the nature of this particular story. A lot of it's about waiting, and about the way things change over time before you realise, and the way some things don't change over time, even when it seems like they have.

“Does it ever stop being summer here?”

In the kitchen, pouring tall glasses of cloudy, pale yellow lemonade, Erik pretends not to hear the question. Erik has brought lemonade, because he knows things about Charles that Charles thinks probably indicate something wrong with him. With Charles, not with Erik. The things that are wrong with Erik sit on an entirely different scale.

There’s a little table growing out of the iron balcony rail that wasn’t there an hour ago, and Erik puts down both glasses there, condensation beading and dripping from the outside already.

“It’ll get warm if you don’t put it back in the fridge.”

Erik rolls his eyes but goes back to the kitchen.

“That was an actual question.”

“Hm?”

“Does it ever stop being summer here? Astonishingly, I never expected to need a detailed knowledge of Peruvian desert climates.”

“The tour guide probably knows.”

The ‘tour guide’ is the local man, or as local as anything is to here, whom Erik pays to bring tourists to the beach, and to a spot some way off in the desert where they can bird-watch, sometimes. Minds for Charles to float through, powerless enough not to threaten Erik. Charles sips the lemonade, tart and sweet and gloriously cold. “Will you kill him if I use his mind?”

Erik picks up his own glass, and doesn’t look at Charles. “Depends what for.”

Charles briefly considers pouring his drink on Erik, but it’s hot, still, and he wants his drink more than he wants to make Erik wet and uncomfortable. Instead he turns his chair away from Erik slightly, sign enough that he’s not amused, because Erik should know that already, really, and probably does. He puts his drink back down on the little makeshift table, and lets his mind flow out, across the bow of beach, to where the cliff curves round like the edge of the world, into that one small mind, probing, searching, pushing, just a little. The man isn’t thinking about the climate, of course, but it doesn’t take much prodding, and the tourists are occupied, two of them taking photos, the third posing in one; Charles doesn’t even have to halt them. He doesn’t want the man to feel him there—wiping memory does damage, and he can’t have the man remember, because he’s not entirely sure what Erik would do with that. So it takes a minute, longer that it could, but he retreats with an answer.

“It will be hot for another five weeks or thereabout.”

“Oh?” Erik is leaning against the rail, facing in to the house rather than out to the ocean, sipping his lemonade, and Charles has the overpowering urge, just for a moment, to kick him—but it’s been weeks and weeks since he’s done that—gone to use his legs—because it’s been months, months and months, and is he ever going to just stop thinking like he has legs? And by the time he’s through being cross with himself, being cross with Erik seems like a lot of effort.

“Hot until June," he finishes belatedly, "though the nights will cool further before then, and then bitterly cold for four months, and then scorchingly hot for another eight.”

Erik nods expressionlessly, and Charles wonders whether he’s thinking about moving Charles somewhere else, or just avoiding comment.

The silence simmers.

“The boys are doing very well, in New York.”

It’s too obviously a subject change for Charles to even bother calling him on it. “They’re having an alright time looking after four children?”

“Six, now.”

Charles looks up. “You could tell me these things.”

Erik smiles something like sceptically. “I have a lot on my mind.”

“But you won’t tell me about that.”

“You won’t want to know.”

“You don’t want me to argue.”

“No, I don’t.”

That puts Charles back to watching the single tourist doing his best to fall over the edge of the cliffs. When they all pile back into the bus to drive down to the beach, Charles looks back at Erik. “They’re doing alright, though?”

Erik nods. “I haven’t seen them myself. By report, though, Hank is very good with them. The other two are learning.”

Charles smiles, an honest smile. “Sean’s so young. But he’s a good boy. He’ll be a good man.”

Erik laughs a little, drily. “Sooner rather than later, with six children.”

Charles nods, and again. “And they’re helping the children with their abilities?”

“You taught them well.”

“I taught you too well for anyone’s good.”

Erik doesn’t rise to it, like he might have a few months ago. “We’ll see.”

“Are they doing anything about schooling? Normal schooling, I mean. Because—“

“Hank’s taking care of it, I’m told.”

Charles’s gaze is distant for a moment, thinking, and then another nod—“Yes, yes of course. Good.” The tourist van winds slowly down the narrow road, mental noise that Charles can almost twist to make it feel like Erik is a real person. “I taught Raven in that house. Taught her to read, math, some basic chemistry and biology, though she stopped tolerating that fairly early. I was never good at teaching science; it came too easily to me. I couldn’t explain the basics.”

Erik raises an eyebrow. “You’re a professor of genetics.”

“Yes, well. I never actually got to teach. Not as a professor.”

“But you were an excellent teacher as a graduate student. Or so you’ve told me. And you will be again. As a professor.” The certainty with which Erik says that, more certain than Charles has ever been, even before he was trapped on the edge of the world, is both instinctively encouraging and, more rationally, rather disturbing.

“One day, when the world has evolved to your liking.”

“One day.”

And all Erik’s certainties are disturbing, really. But it has always been that way, if Charles is honest. And when Erik next takes the wall off to come in, four days later, Charles is watching the back of the tour guide’s head through the eyes of a young Canadian woman relishing the heat, so Erik hasn’t killed the man. And that is something and for now, with Erik’s thumbs pressing firm lines down the back of Charles’s neck, under his collar and up again and out over the tight everything in his shoulders, ‘something’, even a little something, is enough.

***

“Elliot!”

It’s April, Spring in Westchester, and Hank is leaning out the open window of the lab, glaring at his youngest.

Said youngest is hovering five feet off the ground, cross-legged, picking apples and dropping them down for Declan and Milton and Will to catch. This in itself is not unusual, but the children are not allowed play in view of the gates, and Hank does not particularly care that the apple tree in question is probably only really in binoculars’ view of the gates. There could be someone on the road with binoculars.

“Down! Now!”

Elliot drops like a rock, and Hank yells in the same moment as the backs of the kid’s legs hit the ground, and then there’s Declan yelling and Elliot crying and thank god Sean comes into sight because Hank is in fact _busy_ doing something that is not childrearing.

“Hey hey hey okay okay—“

Hank tunes out Sean’s babbling version of dealing-with-the-kids, and goes back to peering through the little viewing slit of Test Chamber #3. Inside, the newest attempt at a plastic that will properly stand up to sharp, heavy, fast-moving steel is in unimpressive pieces. The steel is a little scraped, but otherwise unharmed. This is no longer even a real downer—the plastic is always in pieces, and the steel is always unharmed. There’s a depressing sort of consistency to it.

Sean is carrying Elliot inside, and Hank considers coming out to take care of whatever scrapes and bruises there are this time, but decides against it. Sean didn’t do so much of the looking after of Milton, in the first months of this crazy arrangement, and Sean was the youngest, back when the Professor was still around, and for the first two weeks after Decky and Alisha and Elliot arrived, Hank spent a lot of time rushing in and out and around rather than trusting Sean with children. Now, though, they’re up to six ‘gifted’ ‘students’ and still only three of he and Alex and Sean to look after them, and trusting Sean with children is mostly a matter of necessity, if Hank is ever to get anywhere on any of the dozen plus projects now cluttering up Charles’s lab. Hank’s lab. Who knows if Charles will ever be back.

The front door opens loudly, closes loudly, and Elliot isn’t crying anymore and there’s the faint sound of Decky trying to lecture him about controlling his power better, which is a good sign, because Deck’s a brat but he’s a good kid, and he wouldn’t be being so obnoxious if Elliot were actually hurt.

Hank drops back into his chair, which is always a mistake because it’s not built for someone his size, but he’s only broken one. One more glance through the viewing slit, then expensive pen from Charles’s desk in hand—he breaks pencils, now—and the same notes, almost, as the last fourteen tries. Damn it all but Hank’s a good scientist, was at the top of his field, was working one of the most exclusive posts in the country, and if he’s never going to work a real job or share a single finding with anyone else ever again, he’s still going to do it like the damn good scientist he damn well is.

“Beast yelled at me!” Elliot’s high-pitched squeal is loud through the open door of the lab.

“Because he was worried about you.” Sean is adorable like this, extra earnest, like being very serious and solemn will compensate for being so very young.

“But he surprised me.” Sulking; the kid’s not upset about Hank yelling, just embarrassed about falling out of the air.

“Did I ever tell you about the first time I—“

“Yes!” chorus Decky and Will, because everyone in the house has heard the story of ‘the first time I tried to fly’ several dozen times. It still makes Hank smile, a little. Oh, he’d been more or less miserable at the time, consumed with hating his feet and obsessed with the chance of a cure—and if anything's a case of don't know what you've got 'til it's gone—but everything had meant something, and it had been so easy, and Charles had been so sure of everything, and that had made everyone else so sure of everything, and even with Sean plummeting out the window (or, later, off the satellite dish), it had seemed so safe, with the practically omnipotent Charles hanging out one window and the practically invulnerable Erik hanging out the other.

“Well,” Sean tries again, affecting patience and only sounding younger for it, “You’ll know, then, that I hit the ground pretty hard. And I was already fifteen then! So you guys are doing pretty madly well, you know.”

“I can move the dining table without dropping it,” Decky offers. “I’m only nine. I’ll be way better when I’m fifteen.”

And who knows how many kids they’ll have by then. Now…now they have the six, and they’re coming on well, or they’re all safe and healthy, at least, which Hank thinks is pretty much well. Alex is at the other end of the orchard this afternoon with Alisha and Ari, because only he can really understand the sort of powers they’re trying to learn to live with. The potential to slip and accidentally kill someone before they reach double digits.

Now this is Professor X’s School for Mutants, which is pretty ironic given that Charles isn't here and Hank’s pretty sure he never mentioned anything about turning the estate into a school, but it’s a story for the kids, and it’s not far from the truth. Elliot and Will could theoretically go to a real school, pass as 'normal' like the other four really couldn’t, but there are still all the other problems—the necessarily secret home life; the lack of official papers—neither of them is from the US, for a start; the lack of parents, because Alex and Sean simply do not look like parents. Really. But Hank teaches them real school, as best he can, and Sean reads to them, and they all work on their powers, and it’s more than they would have had anywhere else, and that’s something.

Now the practically omnipotent Charles and the practically invulnerable Erik are—not as much of a mystery as they were a couple months ago, at least. Ari and Will only arrived two weeks ago, and they came from somewhere in South America, Hank’s 90% certain. None of the kids were told anything, but they’d gone for walks outside, and heard people speaking Spanish, seen people, surroundings, enough points of reference to convince Hank that Lensherr and whoever is with him now might not still be at Villa Gesell, but they haven’t gone so far.

Now Hank knows, and Alex and Sean know, that ‘Magneto’ is forming a mutant army, at least fifteen strong now, probably more, because the kids say there were multiple bases. The why is still hazy, still a lot like what Milton first reported—because humans hurt us, and we have to protect each other. Hazy, but not hard to imagine details for with a little thought back to that beach in Cuba. So Hank is working on shielding against metal and if he never has to use it, then that would be lovely, but he will be prepared.

Now they know that none of the kids but Milton ever saw Charles. Four months ago, Charles took control of Azazel’s mind, sent them the message and Milton, and was prevented from doing anything more. Since then, he hasn’t been at Erik’s main base, at least—assuming that the main base is where the children have been coming from. Alex, Hank knows, is convinced the Professor's dead. Sean probably thinks so too, really, though Hank doesn’t think he’d ever admit it without proof.

Hank remembers the two men looking at each other, Charles and Erik, communicating over everyone’s heads without words, smiling at each other hanging out windows or across the table at meals—remembers Erik’s face the day Charles burned out Cerebro, a lifetime ago or close enough—and maybe Lensherr’s lost his mind, but killed Charles? Hank can’t see it. Hank worked for the CIA for a good few years, and he can think of half a dozen things the CIA might do with a telepath who they didn’t want to kill but didn’t want to let meddle. And Erik was always at least as ruthless as the CIA, and the kids’ reports are very consistent about ‘his’ helmet.

And sure, death would be quicker, and easier, and cheaper. But Hank remembers the two of them on the couch together, impossible and powerful and like something magical and strong and wonderful, and four months or forty, he just can’t believe Erik would do it.

***

It is in the water that they began, and it is the water that they mostly gaze at; Erik hates despite himself the reality that he is Charles’s jailor, and Charles hates the same despite his practiced acquiescence. It is easier, a little, to sit in the wind and pretend, even when the sham is so utterly explicit to both of them.

Erik stands behind the wheelchair, hands far enough forward that the backs of his fingers touch the shoulders of Charles’ cardigan, and when Erik talks quietly about things that are not ugliness Charles leans back to rest his head against Erik’s stomach, and Erik makes awkward attempts at making his stomach less hard, and Charles refrains from voicing how much that amuses him, and settles for a small smile that Erik can’t see past Charles’s hair.

It’s fall, autumn, in this part of the world, has been for more than a month, and thus far that has meant nothing but this evening for the first time since Charles came here the wind off the ocean is chill, almost enough to shiver, coming up from the south. Perhaps winter will actually find him here, eventually, as the tour guide’s mind promised.

Erik is made of muscle and produces heat like a furnace, and if the muscles of Erik’s abdomen are not precisely soft, they nonetheless make an entirely acceptable headrest.

Far out to sea is the outline of a vessel, a large one, too distant to distinguish more about its size or type or nation. A few grey gulls circle a way down the beach, rising in spirals, riding the thermals, and Charles thinks of Sean, as he always thinks of all of them, every day. He doesn’t mention it, not right now, because it will change nothing, and because he is too comfortable and too tired of fighting for now to argue for the sake of argument.

Instead he tilts his head, just enough that the side of his cheek feels the warmth of Erik’s skin through his shirt, and murmurs, “Stay here with me,” the lesser cousin of 'let me go,' and feels Erik’s muscles tighten a moment beneath his cheek, expectedly, because it’s not a new request, and Erik will no more yield now than he ever would. Charles does not know in any great detail where Erik goes when he is not here, or what he is doing, but he is not foolish enough to pretend that he does not have a fair idea. He knows that Erik is not nihilistically aggressive in the way that Sebastian Shaw was, and that is something, at least. Erik does not value the protection of ‘humans’ as he values the protection of mutants, certainly, but so far as Charles can tell he is not engaged in the active destruction of the rest of humanity.

Erik relaxes again after a moment, slowly, when Charles doesn’t push the point.

Charles turns his face back to the ocean, thick hair and the back of his skull once more an intermediate layer between his quiet flesh and Erik’s ever-restless heat.

He’s honestly surprised when Erik speaks, and that surprise is almost as surprising as it would have been once, before the helmet; even without telepathy, he knows Erik now like he has never known another person, even Raven.

Erik’s voice is dispassionate as ever but a shade lighter. “The first time you saw me. Do you wish you had let me drown?” Disinterested curiosity is communicated with precise deliberateness in every inflection, every breath.

"Oh..." The expulsion of breath more than a word; Charles blinks once, and again, the setting sun, always setting, always this time of day when Erik comes here—too bright, dampness on the tips of his eyelashes. “Oh, my friend…” It comes as a whisper and that is expected, too.

Charles closes his eyes, and bites his lip, not hard, and swallows, clears his throat silently. He doesn’t have to look back to know that Erik raises an eyebrow, the ‘I don’t care about your answer, I simply expect you to answer’ look that intimidates everyone else. He can feel Erik’s breathing in the rise and fall of flesh and muscle behind his head.

“I can hate what you have become,” he articulates at last, words chosen with careful honesty, “And I can hate what you have done to me, and I imagine that if I knew more of where you are and what you do when you are not here, I might wonder at myself and my poor semblance of any goodness for not wishing it. But…"

Charles lifts his head half an inch to shake it slowly, more to himself than to Erik. The backs of his curls drag small seams of friction against Erik's ugly wool-cotton tunic.

“I do not wish you dead, my dear friend. I should, perhaps, but I do not.”

And Erik nods, barely, and watches the edge of the sun sink below the deceptively simple line between sea and sky, the ridge of the helmet casting soft shadow over his eyes.

***

On a nameless autumn night, Erik unties one shoe and then the other, slides each off and silently places it on the floor by the bed, never taking his eyes off Charles’s shoulders, rising and falling minutely with his breath. The first tiny curve of the sun is just breasting the horizon, spreading like burning oil along the line of it where minutes ago was darkness. Charles is sleeping; Erik has become less noisy at opening the wall.

He takes his socks off using his toes, pushes them into his shoes, also with his toes, then presses both hands into Charles’s mattress and lowers himself down slowly, careful not to rock the mattress more than necessary. Charles remains asleep as Erik settles on his side behind him. There will be a moment, when the sun beats through his eyelids and rouses him—a moment when Charles doesn’t remember anything except the feel of a body at his back, and presses back into Erik, and smiles, and makes some pleased, incoherent morning noise, perhaps leans awkwardly back to press a kiss to Erik’s shoulder—and then he will remember, and he’ll still press back, settle against Erik’s shoulder, maybe brush his lips along the pad of Erik’s right hand thumb, or weirdly chew on one of Erik’s fingertips, because Charles is weird like that—but he'll be tired, and sad, and sick, and not really smiling. And Erik pretends he doesn’t want that moment, before, even though he knows it’s a lie, and even though he hates lying to himself.

Charles is sleeping, and he shifts in his sleep, awkwardly, hampered by the dead weight of his legs, curls back a little into the warmth behind him because the sun is only just rising, so the night is still cool. Charles makes a quiet, satisfied sort of grumbling noise, and Erik presses lips against his skull, and breathes slowly with Charles’s soft hair against his cheek and Charles’s soft skin beneath one hand, and adores Charles more than life or freedom or vengeance.

The sun broaches the distance the colour of molten metal and the sky turns black to gold to blue, and Erik knows with every certainty, blood and bone and his coin through Shaw’s skull that one day, one day he will take Charles away from here, and back to a world where he is honoured, where he is revered, where no one could think of hurting them and then, then—he knows, he knows—Charles will wake up in his arms, and understand, and smile.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thanks to:
> 
> avictoriangirl, Shaliara, sakurazukalori, spoonring, morethanpixels and Little D (who is back! yay! :D) for their lovely comments on last chapter - you guys are, as always, the whole point of posting a story <3
> 
> furius for making me like the fic a little more with her beautiful comment :)
> 
> zedille because there's no such thing as too much when it comes to literature class XD
> 
> and Cathliz for rediscovering the story this morning and reminding me that it is no longer new year's holiday and it's about time I come post another chapter XD


	7. Chapter 7

On the twelfth day of May, the wall slides out mid-morning, too early for the tourists to be close—Charles is eating an apple, very slowly, by the dining table, and considering wheeling his chair into the kitchen where the bench shadows out some of the heat and going back to sleep sitting up. Then a large piece of the wall hovers out of place, silent now but visible in the corner of Charles’s eye, and when Charles pivots the chair, Erik is waving something in one hand.

“You have a present.”

For a moment, Charles is wildly hopeful—he believes Erik when he says that the boys are well, but something from them would ease his mind in a way that Erik’s word simply can’t, not now, not when Erik is holding him prisoner here and has a vested interest in keeping him calm. Then he actually looks, and sees what Erik’s holding, and that hope falls flat.

Erik sees his face fall, of course, and his own falls, and it’s just unfortunate really, because Charles is rather pleased, despite the disappointment, and it would be nice to just be pleased.

Erik sits on the edge of the bed rather than coming over to the table, which probably means he hasn’t slept in a day. “What were you hoping for instead?”

“Nothing.” Charles pushes back from the table, leaves the apple there. “What’s the article?”

“You don’t know?”

Charles reaches the bed, takes the copy of _Advances in Genetics_ and flicks to the contents page. “It’s much too soon to be one of the ones you’ve sent for me. I had…nine? articles in with various editors before—I left Oxford. I don’t remember which ones were where.”

“You can tell me, you know.” Erik is toeing off his shoes and leaning heavily on one hand on the mattress, which means he definitely hasn’t slept in at least a day. Maybe two.

It’s tempting, but not really. Charles knows what the answer would be, and he couldn’t bear it—or he could, because he thinks he could bear anything now, maybe, but he couldn’t look at Erik, couldn’t speak to him, and it’s so much easier, for now, when he can’t do anything about any of it anyway, to just not talk about it.

“Have you read it?”

Erik leans over a little, looks over Charles’s shoulder. “I doubt I’d understand it.”

Charles shrugs one shoulder, smiles a little—Erik rolls his eyes.

Charles scans the article—he wrote it, and he knew what was in it as soon as he saw the title. He’s pleased to see it in print, but it’s not much of a victory. Erik has leaned back again. Charles looks back over his shoulder. “I was thinking of going back to bed. Or—well, I was thinking of going to sleep in the kitchen, honestly.”

Erik frowns. “I’ll open the doors to the breeze.”

“Nngh.”

That startles a snort of laughter from Erik, who swings himself to standing and goes to open the door.

“The sun’s still too hot.”

“I’ll make a wall.”

“And that wall will be metal, and thus not help our problem.”

But Erik is Erik, and it was Charles who made him like this, in some part, gave him this confidence ( _but then it was Erik who tried to wrap a ship in its own anchor chain before Charles had ever spoken a word to him, so_ ).

The metal flows out of the walls like water, because the walls are thick, thick enough that Charles could ram a chair leg at one of them for hours and not make a dent (and he doesn’t know that for sure, because he hasn’t tried the stairs again, but he toys with the idea, now and then).

“I am not sleeping under a big sheet of metal.”

“This house is a big sheet of metal.”

“Thanks to you.”

“Mmhm.” The metal is pooled somewhere between the bed and the window, pooled and floating slowly upward. Erik is barely moving one hand. Some far cry from that day inside his mind, Erik straining his body like it could be a matter of physically reaching out to move Charles’s satellite dish. Charles knows he should regret that, should regret giving Erik the mental and emotional wherewithal to do this to him—to trap him here; to tear apart the world, perhaps. He doesn’t. He can’t, and he doesn’t really think that’s a bad thing, that he can’t regret it. To be able to hate someone and still love them—to be able to hate someone and still not wish them hurt—shouldn’t be a bad thing.

And besides. Without Erik, he and the boys could not have stopped Shaw from tearing the world apart right there and then. Even had he managed it, somehow, without Erik, he could not have protected Raven, and Moira, and the boys from all that arsenal of missiles set to blow _them_ to pieces. If it hasn’t gone quite so well since then…well. Charles has spent his life being grateful for small things.

Erik is grinning.

Charles grimaces. “It’s metal, Erik.”

“Come here.”

Charles propels himself away from the bed, rolls over to where Erik’s posturing mostly because he has nothing else to do.

“See?”

The side of the ‘wall’ facing the sun is mirrored, flawlessly; polished to a sheen like perfectly still water.

Erik has come such a long way. “I’m impressed.”

Erik never tries not to look pleased, but it suits him; he doesn’t smile enough. “Will it serve?”

Charles rolls his shoulders through a shrug, studies his own face a moment longer before retreating to the new shadow. “Probably. I’m not a physicist.”

Erik snorts a laugh, and sits down something very close to happily on the edge of Charles’s bed. His posture is easy, his legs spread—he’s high on Charles’s praise, Charles knows this. He can’t think of any way to use it, but he knows it. He’s not sure whether he’s more pleased himself, to see Erik smiling for once, to see him relaxed, like he might not snap the next person he sees in two, or whether he’s more sad, that his own response is really mostly the strong desire to find a way to push him out the window and see if he still looks so pleased.

“Read it to me.”

Charles raises an eyebrow. “Excuse me?”

There’s a challenge in Erik’s smile, too too close to nights and nights of chess and sex and plans and chess and madness in Charles’s study a world ago. “Read it to me. I want to understand what you do.”

“…I have a doctorate in genetics, Erik.”

“And?”

“The people who read this journal also have doctorates in genetics.”

“Explain it to me.”

Charles twists his chair a little, the not-quite-so-easy this-new-body equivalent of tapping his foot, he thinks, though it’s hard to draw equivalencies here. “I’m not sure—“

“Come on, Charles.” Erik is at his most charming—pleased, confident, magnanimous, glorious in the easy undirected power of every part of him. “If you’re actually going to sleep, I’ll go. But I know you only sleep to avoid boredom.”

“I sleep because my _human_ body requires it.”

“At one in the afternoon?” His tone is innocent, as though it were an honest question.

Charles groans, and if there’s fondness in it, he’s not ashamed of it. To hate and love someone at once _is_ a gift—anything that dilutes hate has to be a gift. “Fine. Alright, my friend.” Charles hates reading in his chair, the crick it gives his neck; he tosses the journal to sit atop the blankets before swinging himself after it, palms wrapped firmly around the arms of the chair. Erik is halfway to standing to help, but Charles is already there.

“Alright…” Charles picks up the journal again, grimaces as he shuffles awkwardly round ’til his head is at the right end of the bed to push himself up to sit.

“You’ve gotten good.”

“Hmm?” The journal falls open at the right page; Erik has tried to read it already, perhaps—or perhaps has only had it open on a table somewhere.

Erik sits back down, shifts to sit against the head of the frame too, stretches his legs down the bed, long and strong and dead straight where Charles’s are sort of crumpled, not overtly wrong but enough that a passerby, did passers-by exist on the edge of the desert, might glance twice and frown.

Erik’s legs don’t touch Charles’s, because Erik has always been sensitive to the pain felt by broken things.

Charles grimaces at the page again. “I’m not sure how to begin.”

Erik is relaxed, in his body, leaning back, halfway to lying down, watching the side of Charles’s face in a way that would be deeply obnoxious did not his expression make so clear his absolutely genuine intention to attempt to learn. “Start reading. I’ll tell you when I don’t understand.”

Charles glances over his shoulder. “You won’t understand.”

Erik nods easily. “We have plenty of time.”

Charles looks vaguely incredulous, but—he’s not going anywhere. And it’s a rare occasion, that Erik is genuinely willing to listen. He looks back down at the page, shakes his head once, and begins: “The basic assumption of evolutionary genetics has, since the early…”

***

When the seventh and eighth children arrive on the doorstep, Hank calls a ‘staff’ meeting.

They gather around the fire, after the children have gone to bed; the lab would be more private, or Hank knows that he _could_ use Charles’s study. But he’s still not comfortable with that, and he hasn’t really given it much thought—he likes the kids to be able to find them easily, if something happens in the night. Not that things happen often; once, Declan thought Will had disappeared, because Will had spontaneously discovered (sort of, in his sleep, and he hasn’t managed it again) how to shield himself from sight; two days after she arrived, Alisha blew a hole in her bedroom ceiling. It has been a matter of extreme luck that the room above had been empty of both people and plumbing, and that the table that fell through the hole had narrowly missed the little girl. The explosion had blown the power to half the house, but that had been mended. Alisha sleeps on the top floor, now, beneath an empty ceiling that would yield only plaster and sky if blasted, and a part of the roof made of tin rather than heavy tile. Those have been the only major incidents and though most of the children are more-than-usually prone to nightmares, none of them are prone to seeking comfort. Maybe one day that will change. Maybe not.

The day that the seventh and eighth children arrive, Hank and Alex and Sean settle around the fire with more-than-usual purpose.

“Have we figured out what Maggie _does_?” Alex yawns massively off the end of the sentence, leaning against an ottoman, soles of his feet roasting by the flames.

“Jill says she doesn’t talk,” Sean offers.

“Yeah we were all there doofus.” Alex flicks a pair of dice at him, retrieved from under the table.

They bounce off his thigh. Sean shrugs.

Hank sighs deeply in the big armchair. “I think we need to actually make some plans.”

“I reckon, we should buy some crayons,” Sean twists around to look at Hank. “You know, like they get kids who’ve had trauma and stuff to draw stuff? So maybe she could draw what she does.”

“Yeah, I—okay, that’s not a bad idea.” Hank tries not to stare nervously at Alex fiddling ominously with his control panel. “I meant—that’s not what I meant, though.”

Sean is writing ‘crayons’ on Alex’s hand with a biro, also from under the table. Alex looks back at Hank, one eyebrow raised.

Hank clears his throat. “Look…I don’t know that anyone else is coming back. And we have eight kids now.”

Alex shrugs. “Newsflash.”

“Yeah, thanks Alex.” Hank glares a bit at the fire, but they’re all tired. “Look, I mean, like it or not, we are sort of turning into a school, don’t you think?”

“We aren’t hiring actual proper teachers.”

Alex stared at Sean like he’d grown another head. “No shit, Sherlock.”

Sean throws the dice back; Alex catches them in one hand. Sean makes a face. “So what are we supposed to do? We can’t hire teachers, I’m a shit teacher, and Alex didn’t even go to school.”

“Oi.” Alex kicks Sean hard in the knee—Sean lets out a high-pitched yelp and then glances nervously at the ceiling, as though the house weren’t too enormous for them to wake the kids.

“It’s true!”

“I did some school. And I know shit anyway. Fuck off.”

“Okay, okay,” Hank calms without much conviction. “I know it’s not ideal, but we need to figure out something. Even if it’s just—I mean, I can cover math and science and probably a bit of history. Your reading to them’s good, Sean. Maybe we can make it a bit more structured, get them to read and write…and we should make their practice more structured as well, their work on their abilities.”

“So what, you want a timetable?” Alex is valiantly ignoring his exclusion from the academic teaching schedule—Sean isn’t wrong about the holes in his education, though he could probably do better than Sean on the reading and writing front were he so inclined.

The thought of Alex trying to teach small children to write induces a sense of creeping dread in Hank.

Sean swipes the dice back, and absently juggles them. They fling tiny, barely-visible spots of shadow all over the room, so close to the firelight. “We could make them do, like, an hour of school stuff a day, and two hours of stuff on their powers?”

Hank coughs a laugh. “Did _you_ go to school?”

Sean frowns not very seriously. “Sometimes.”

Alex smirks.

“They’re young kids. They need to be doing more than seven hours of schooling a week.”

“Five,” Sean corrects then adds, at Hank’s incredulous look—“Weekends, dude!”

Alex grabs one die out of the air and sits on it. “I can take them for two hours on their powers every day. Get them to do another one or two on their own. Then an hour of reading and writing, if you can actually teach them anything, and an hour or two on Hank stuff. That’s like twenty plus school stuff a week, and nearly thirty on powers.”

“And no weekends ever.” Sean shakes his head in only-somewhat-mock despair.

“‘Cause weekends’ll be awesome when the CIA finds us.”

“The house is totally off the record, man!”

“There have to be financial records somewhere. Xavier’s dad buying the house or something. They’ll find us eventually. It’s the CIA.”

Hank knows, really, that Alex is probably right. He worked for the CIA for nearly three years. The people he worked for there—not the people he worked with, the scientists, who nearly always meant well, but the people he worked for, who were so sure of their own rightness, always, that they’d burn through anything in their way—those people would not have stopped looking. Those people would find any trace, if it was there to be found and if it wasn’t, then soon enough they’d turn to other methods—find anyone who’d met the mutants, met he and Alex and Sean and Charles and Erik, collect sketches, memories of accents, track down CCTV footage—they’d figure out Charles’s accent, either the New York State part or the Oxford part, and they’d track him to Oxford, and someone there would know where he lived, or they’d come here and just knock on every door in the state until they found them.

But there is nothing he can do about that. Nothing except try to teach the kids to protect themselves, and stay strong himself, and work on ways to protect them all better, and keep a careful mental list of any and all bargaining chips that might come in handy.

The more immediate problem he _can_ take care of, and he isn’t about to be sidetracked. He ignores Alex and Sean making faces at each other. “I don’t think we need to get carried away. They’re little kids. Just ‘cause we were able to work so much and do well doesn’t mean they can. So maybe…yeah, maybe we do weekends. And give them lots of free time. But I think your plan sounds pretty good, Alex. Three hours of school a day, two hours of work on their abilities, plus another hour working on them alone…I think that sounds good.”

It’s a question, really; Hank isn’t cut out for this, in so many ways. It is ‘Professor Xavier’s School for Mutants’, not ‘Hank the Beast’s School for Mutants’. Hank had worked for the CIA since he graduated, since before he graduated, because following instructions works for him, being given a cause and a task and boundaries and then putting his mind to something and doing it, that all works well for him. But Sean is a kid and Alex has pulled himself together a hell of a lot but he’s still a loose canon, still more angry than anything else. And the reality of it all is, stupid or not, that being ten feet tall and built like a tank makes people listen to Hank, look to him for answers, even though he pretty much never really has them.

Alex shrugs. “Cool.”

Sean prods at the fire with a long iron poker, and Alex pulls his feet away an inch, and Sean laughs at him. “I can teach them to read and stuff. If you think that’s a good idea.”

“Do you actually have any idea how to teach people to read?”

“Least I can read.”

“We can all read, dickhead.”

Hank sighs again, and tips his head back in the chair. Of course Sean doesn’t know how to teach people to read. Neither does he. But the kids should have a chance, to know those things, to have a chance in life, and bringing in teachers isn’t an option when the government of the United States wants them locked up at best, dead at worst, and so Sean, and he and Alex, will just have to try. Trying has to be the best option. Trying is always the best option, isn’t it? 

That’s what the Professor would have said, at least. Charles would have said that trying is always the better option. And so Hank will try. And he’ll keep trying, and if the CIA comes, then he’ll lock down the house and figure something out. Hell, he is a ‘beast’. Maybe he could dig them a tunnel out.

They play a round of poker just because, using miscellanea, including the dice and a small pewter statue of an owl, instead of money. Alex always wins. Tonight is no different.

Then Hank puts out the fire, and Alex checks the gate and the yard, and Sean checks on eight children, all sleeping, soundly for now.

Then they confirm with nods and mumbles that all is well, that there is no army marching on the estate, that there is no imminent disaster brewing, and they say goodnight.

Then they go to bed, and Professor Xavier’s School for Mutants sleeps.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Sorry for the wait (again) guys! I get here eventually XD
> 
> Thank you very much to zedille, Little D, furius, sakurazukalori and Cathliz for their thoughts last chapter - these boys are very depressing, but YOU GUYS MAKE ME VERY HAPPY <3
> 
> Please drop in and let me know you're here :D


	8. Chapter 8

It’s late, when Erik leaves. He doesn’t think Charles is awake. To be fair, Charles isn’t awake, until Erik manoeuvres his right arm out from under him and Charles floats back to consciousness. He lets Erik go unapprehended—listens to him leave rather than saying ‘goodbye’ or sitting up to watch. There are a slew of reasons for that: Erik won’t tell him what he’s going back to, and that can be terrifying; Charles is tired and comfortable and sitting up seems like an awful lot of effort; there’s something satisfying in listening to Erik move, knowing that he doesn’t know he’s watched. Or listened to.

Soft, deliberate footsteps stop on the far side of the room, behind the bedhead; there’s the tiny, subtle creak of the wall separating; then the almost silent slither of it setting back in place. Erik doesn’t whisper any farewells as he goes, probably doesn’t look back over his shoulder; he’s not sentimental like that. He knows that Charles will still be here when he next visits, and so he is untroubled in leaving.

Charles counts to ten after the wall settles before he breathes out. Yawns in another breath, yawns it out again.

It’s nearly seven hours since Erik started dozing through Charles’s attempts to explain his article—which is not to say that Erik does not make an intensely attentive audience, but after an hour and a half of trying…well. God knows how long it had been since Erik had slept. And so Charles had given up explaining, and just read him the rest of the article, in a soft murmur, and Erik had ‘mmmed’ and nodded sleepily a few times, for ten minutes or so, and then he’d been snoring, softly, and Charles had scanned through the article once more himself then set it down on the blankets over the lump that was his legs.

He’d watched Erik, for a bit, sprawling and shifting; he’d considered, for the hundredth time in the last few months, trying to pry off the helmet—headpiece—not a helmet now, as such, not since last Tuesday when the helmet was replaced, sans-explanation, by this closer-fitting version that looks so awfully much more permanent. Charles has prodded, a bit—all Erik will say of his new metal shell is that it’s more comfortable to sleep in. Charles has watched, though—watched Erik hang his head upside down, drag his head along a pillow, catch the edge of the thing on the edge of the kitchen counter standing up, even rub at his hair. However it’s attached, and he still has no idea how it’s attached, it’s not coming off. It might still be worth a try, were Erik unconscious, or drugged, but as it is, touching his head would wake him at once, Erik’s always been a hair-trigger to wake up. Nothing would be accomplished. And Charles isn’t really sure what Erik might do.

So he watches Erik sleep, and when Erik half-wakes long enough to detach his ridiculous cape, which is awkwardly caught under him, and make a sleepy attempt at words in Charles’s direction, and stretch out an arm, Charles shifts himself over, and curls into Erik as best he can, because hate and love and love and hate and it’s comfortable and still feels oh so safe and good, even though that’s patently absurd.

And when, hours later, dark well since fallen, Erik carefully manoeuvres his arm free, carefully, gently resettles Charles with his pillows, slides out of bed, slinks back out into the desert, Charles has slept a few hours, but he’s had more than enough hours spare, too, to think.

A few yards away, blocking his view out the window, Erik’s new metal sun-shield stands like a wave frozen halfway to breaking. This side is dull; the other side will be reflecting the moonlight, blinding, maybe, or just shimmering. Charles can’t remember how full the moon is at present.

He has toyed with the idea, often enough, of a chair leg or a kitchen implement or perhaps even his wheelchair repeatedly meeting the metal wall between here and the desert, where there used to be a door before he split his head open and broke his arm trying to reach it. Right now, half the usual thickness of that wall is hovering by his bed. Right now, perhaps—right now, if ever—perhaps, maybe, that metal sheet where there used to be a wall and door and now is not might crumple beneath a chair leg, forcefully applied, might dent and snap given a focused barrage by a heavy wheelchair.

***

The journey into town to purchase groceries has become both a lot easier, and bordering on untenable. On the plus side, the June weather is hovering in the vicinity of paradise, sunny but not hot, clear-skied, gentle breeze. The footpath to the bus is immeasurably easier without knee-deep snow on large stretches, and they haven’t been caught in the rain since early April. The issue now is not one of climate but of task. In Winter, they’d been shopping for three people, then four. Now they are shopping for eleven, and yeah, they can carry more on dry ground, but the whole thing is becoming problematic—people stare when you board the bus with ten bags each. Right now, Alex has twenty-one bags working deep red dents into his arms, and Sean is weighing up the relative merits of the two packs of crayons sold at the convenience store.

At the counter, he smiles his genial-young-man grin at the shopkeeper, while Alex lurks by the doorway and pretends his shoulders aren’t getting sore.

The shopkeeper hands the crayons back in a little paper bag and glances quizzically between them. “Thought you boys were living alone?”

Alex tenses—feels the muscles in the back of his neck tighten all the way down his back, ready to fight. The people here have believed for more than half a year that he and Sean are brothers. Because they look so alike. It was always going to break eventually.

Sean coughs. “Uh.” Another cough. “Yeah, well.”

“Don’t tell me you need crayons for college. What is it you’re studying?”

Sean laughs very unconvincingly. Alex starts lowering the bags to the floor. “Uh, huh. Haha. Um, no, no actually, um, our kid sister’s come to stay. With our mum. Our mum’s come to stay with our kid sister. Brought our kid sister. To stay with us.” He grins. Really, really unconvincingly.

The shopkeeper beams. “You’re very lucky, aren’t you? Not many boys would have their mom crossing the country to come take care of their washing!”

Alex breathes out. Idiots. Sean grins properly. “Huh, uh, yeah. I mean, no, we do our own washing, and stuff. But yeah. It’s awesome. Having her here.”

The shopkeeper nods a few times and finally, finally hands over the change. “Well, it’s good of you to buy something for your little sister. You say hi to your mum from me.”

And Alex pushes the door open with a shoulder before anything else can be said and Sean, thank god, smiles once more at the guy and follows.

Outside, on the street corner, Sean slips the crayons into one of the shopping bags and starts sliding them from Alex’s forearms onto his own.

Alex rolls his shoulders, repositions the remaining bags to new bits of skin not yet red and white and smarting. “Mind his own business, could he.”

Sean shrugs, starting back in the direction of the bus stop with three bags awkwardly clutched in each hand, one on each wrist. “He’s just being nice. It’s all good.”

Alex isn’t sure how he always ends up with well over half the shopping. “It’s dangerous. Someone came through asking questions, you don’t think he’d tell them about us?”

“Tell what? That we’re brothers going to college and our mom visited once?”

“That we’re new in town, no one really knows us, no one knows exactly where we’re living, that our story isn’t always straight.”

“We’ve been here like eight months, dude. No one’s coming.”

“You’re so fucking naive, Sean.”

“Nye nye nye blah blah whatever.” Sean flaps the tips of his fingers open and shut not-very-illustratively, ‘cause he is still holding bags.

“Where does he get off, offloading little kids on us from god knows where?”

“Save it, dude.”

“So you’re down with it.”

“We’re in public, man.”

Alex scoffs. “If anyone can hear us from over…” he nods in the direction of the closest person, sitting on a bench on the other side of an attractive park square. “There. Then they’ve got a secret of their own.”

“Says the dude who’s paranoid about the CIA.”

The bus stop is empty—it’s mid-afternoon on a Thursday. The bus pulls up three minutes late, as it always does. They each take a two-seat bank, the second seat for shopping bags, and dump the shopping first before paying the driver. He takes their coins with a, “Usual stop?”

Sean smiles; Alex nods. They each look out the window for the thirteen minutes of the ride; no one else gets on, the bus doesn’t stop, and no one speaks.

At Bearing St—three-quarters of the way along, or thereabouts, but the stop, unsigned but generally regarded as marked by the massive elm with the weird low branch that never quite touches the ground, just gets the street name—they file off the bus again, bags lined up along arms. “Lot to carry!” remarks the bus driver goodnaturedly.

Sean grimaces. Alex scowls. The bus grumbles into motion again and disappears at the corner. It’s two miles to the estate and if they get any more kids, Alex is going to make Hank forge him a driver’s license.

“Who do you think’s sending the kids?”

“Huh?”

“Who do think’s sending them?” Sean swings a handful of bags to knock Alex and Alex glares and sidesteps, because they’ve ended up with a broken bag and groceries on the footpath that way once before. “They’re not just dropping off the trees. That’d be pretty cool.”

“It really wouldn’t.” Alex scuffs the toe of his shoe. It doesn’t scuff, visibly; it’s Made-by-Hank and doesn’t break without a bullet, or maybe a really sharp knife.

Sean kicks a large pebble. “So? Who?”

“I dunno. Metal-man Nazi-hunter, I guess.”

“You think he’d be interested in kids, though? I thought maybe the Professor.”

Alex stares a bit, then kicks the pebble out into the road, for some bastard lucky enough to have a driver’s license to run over. “If Xavier isn’t dead, he’s in one of those holding cells we found in Argentina. Just somewhere else.”

Sean has the gall to look miserable at that, chewing on his lip and looking for all the world like they don’t all know it’s true. “But someone got rid of the records about the house. And it’s his house. And someone’s been going around picking up little kids who need help and sending them here. Doesn’t that sound like him?”

“Dude, we know he sent Milton, we know he meant to come after, and we know he didn’t.” And Sean doesn’t get to pretend otherwise like a fucking kid. The last thing Alex needs is another kid. “We know Lensherr’s building an army. You think Xavier’s on board with that?”

Sean shrugs miserably. “Probably not.”

“So he’s either imprisoned somewhere, or he’s dead. We know who’s sending the kids. He’s building an army, the kids are the leftovers. Have you been deaf all year?”

“Hey man—"

“There’s no help coming, there’s no reinforcements, and chances are Lensherr’s going to show up at some point and want everyone back for his army, us included. If the CIA doesn’t get to us first.”

That shuts the conversation down for the length of Augean Drive, which is a stupid name for a street, turn right to cut down Culvert Lane which isn’t really a public thoroughfare but avoids walking all the way around the massive farm-estate-thing it belongs to, then left onto the long, bumpy, aspen-lined road that runs almost all the way to ‘Professor X’s School’.

Sean thinks about flying the groceries home.

When the dogwood trees of the estate come into view in the distance, Sean says “I don’t want to be in an army.”

Alex doesn’t answer.

“I mean, I get that people locked you up and stuff, and maybe it sounds good to you, but I don’t want to—"

“Maybe it sounds good to me?”

Sean shrugs.

“Hey.” Alex has stopped walking; Sean looks honestly surprised, looking back over his shoulder. “Just because I can blow shit up, doesn’t mean I want to.”

Sean quirks an awkward smile. “You’ve blown up three fireplaces this year.”

“Yeah, and how many people?”

Eyes widen comically—Sean has a stupid face.

“Maybe it sounds good to me? Do you know how much work I’ve put in to make sure I don’t kill people? You think I want to be dragged off to kill people he thinks might hurt us? He’s as bad as the cunt who killed Darwin.”

Sean swallows thickly, fish eyed. “Okay, yeah, I hear that.”

“You don’t get to lump me in with those dicks just because I’m not useful for much else. What about the girls, hey? What about Alisha and Ari? You going to ship them off to join an army too?”

“Dude, okay, I didn’t mean that, I’m sorry.”

“Don’t act like you fucking know me.” Alex starts walking again abruptly, not looking at Sean. “You ‘get that people locked me up’? Get real man.”

“Hey!” Sean jogs a little, catches up easily enough; Alex isn’t really trying to outdistance him. “I’m sorry, okay?”

“Whatever.”

“Aleeeex.”

There is no shade on this last stretch, and the sun raises sweat on the nape of Alex’s neck, in Sean’s stupid thick hair, on the backs of their hands.

“Havooooooook.”

“Enough with the friggin codenames, Sean!”

In the house, Hank has the kids round the massive formal dining table. Declan and Will are sliding notes to each other from adjacent seats; Milton is, for no readily apparent reason, a startling shade of purple; and Ari and Elliot both have hands over their mouths to muffle laughter. Hank is on his knees by the new girl, one of the new girls, Jill; on his knees he is still taller than the little thing sitting in the elaborately carved chair, two heads bent over a sheet of paper and a pencil, one big and blue and furry, one tiny and sporting very uneven braids. Some of the kids stop what they're doing to wave as Alex and Sean pass through to the kitchen; Hank doesn’t even notice.

Alex puts the milk and cheese and meat in the fridge, while Sean rearranges the pantry.

“He’s not getting the kids back. Any of them.”

Sean turns around from a box of rice pops that has somehow emptied itself since yesterday morning. “Sorry?”

Alex shuts the fridge, puts a few things back in a bag to take to the icebox. “Lensherr. He’s not getting the kids back. He tries, we’re going to defend ourselves.”

Sean chews the inside of his lip a second, then leaves the bags on the pantry floor. “Thought you didn’t want him sending them?”

Alex glares. “His army building thing. It’s a shit plan. What’s he going to do, go to war against the whole world?”

Sean shrugs. “I guess. I don’t know. He never really liked normal people.”

Alex looks back through the kitchen door—Hank is standing next to Milton now, and Milton is slowly fading back to a normal colour, looking not very sorry. “Screw him. The Professor might be too spineless to fight him on it, but I’m not.”

“Hey man—“

“Don’t. He talks the talk and all, and I’m a fan of the guy, I probably wouldn’t ever have gotten this far with my control stuff without it, but seriously? He’s all peace, figure things out, no one should fight, and now he’s sitting by somewhere while his boyfriend tries to go all evil warlord or something. I’m not going to do that. Lensherr wants to start a war, I’ll fight to stop him. We stopped Shaw, didn’t we?”

Sean shrugs, sort of, glances awkwardly out to where Hank is still utterly focused on the kids—but he’s smiling, and then smiling some more. “Yeah.” Alex is sitting on the edge of the kitchen bench, but he looks strong, strong like he could keep the whole world safe with the look in his eyes. If Sean’s grinning a bit, that’s hardly his fault. “Yeah. Yeah, we did.”

***

It’s dark; the moon, it turns out, is a little more than a sliver.

The house is mostly metal now, so it holds the heat for a long while, but the desert is cold in the dark and the heat goes quickly.

Charles is staring at the wall, like there might be some visible indication of how thick it is now. By his wheelchair are one of the dining chairs, the largest metal pan, and a very sizeable cooking knife that Erik only brought once he was sure Charles wasn’t interested in suicide.

Charles turns his chair in a slow circle, scanning the room. There are other things that could be used to bash at a sheet of metal, but nothing that would have a different effect to his existing selection of implements.

He comes full circle back to face the ‘door’, the metal barrier where the door was, the last time he reached it, cracked his head open and passed out on the floor.

The stairs haven’t changed since then. Charles is quite substantially better with his chair, but he hasn’t tried it on stairs again. Last time is not an experience he’s relished the idea of repeating. Maybe if he’d thought of bringing a normal chair over last time, not the wheelchair, something easier to stand up if it falls over, he could have reached the door handle. If he’d been able to get onto the chair. There’s no door now, so it’s a moot point.

There’s no one for a hundred miles to hear, and Charles picks up the dining chair and throws it toward the metal wall. The crash makes him jump just because it’s the loudest sound he’s heard in months, but the chair stays in one piece, and there really is no one to hear. He throws the pan, and then the knife. Nothing left to get down there but himself. And his wheelchair.

It’s dark, and the heat leaves the house quickly in the dark, and it’s only three stairs down to ground level.

Charles sits in his wheelchair on the very edge of the drop, and breathes in.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I am getting on a plane to fly to the other side of the world in a day and a half. This may mean delayed update (because that would be so unusual 8'D). Might not, but fair warning. I will endeavour to stick to schedule, though, so next chapter should be in a week or thereabouts.
> 
> Big needy-author thank-yous to zedille, Shaliara, avictoriangirl, Nissa, sakurazukalori, Cathliz, azryal and spoonring for dropping in on me last week :D You all say the best things.
> 
> Sakura - BABY MUTANTS XD  
> Zed - FEELS ;_;  
> ...okay I am going to go reply to comments on the comments instead of here XD


	9. Chapter 9

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Sorry for the long wait, guys! Had a fantastic time in the USA, then got the current stage of confirmation presentations for my doctoral project over and done with, and now I'm off to Japan on Friday! But because this was ages, I'm going to post another chapter before then, so look out for another update tomorrow or the next day (Wed/Thurs).
> 
> Thanks everyone for reading <3 And thanks especially to furius (YOUR COMMENTS ARE SO GOOD), zedille (your comments are much nicer about my writing than I probably deserve :P <3), Shaliara (mwahahaha), victoriangirl (MWAHAHAHAHA ;D), sakura (because comments with quotes are super helpful and your comments are always awesome <3), and Cathliz (because that comment actually makes me excited to keep going with the plot lol XD). You guys rock. Thanks for taking the time :)) And thanks everyone for taking the time to read!

The last time he tried this has not faded in Charles’s mind.

It wasn’t that he didn’t realise that wheelchairs aren’t truly made for stairs, or that those who can manoeuvre them on stairs have had years of practice —but he was desperate, more desperate than now perhaps, or perhaps not—now he is so very aware that Erik will keep him here forever if he continues to think it the most practical option for his plans. But he was desperate, the last time, and somewhat delirious, and not at all well. He was suffering from telepathic starvation, of a sort, terrified of what he might unwittingly do to his doctor's mind, kind, meticulous Doctor Calker, and more than half mad and if he knew that the wheelchair might not ( _probably wouldn’t_ ) stay upright down the stairs, he didn’t really think about what that meant for him. He didn’t think about not having legs, or about that having an impact on the rest of his body, or about his legs still being able to sustain injury, and lose blood. He didn’t think about being able to be more hurt than he was already.

He is aware, now, that he is comparatively well, for a paraplegic. He is well-rested, sane; he is healthy, in his upper body. Even his lower body is well-exercised, has good blood flow, is in reasonable shape apart from having no connection to his central nervous system. He is aware that throwing himself down a flight of stairs, even a short flight of stairs, could change that—he could break his back much higher up. He could split his head in two. He could kill himself, he could lose the movement of his upper body as well as his lower. He could do any number of foolish things.

Fortunately, being close to sane this time round has its advantages. Charles has thought this through, thought it through often enough in the past, only half-serious, because he saw the thickness of that wall when Erik separated it, but thought it through in detail today, tonight, while Erik slept. Half the mass of the wall, half at least, is now elsewhere, arcing frozen by his bed. And Charles has thought about how he might use that, how he might get to the wall without a bleeding hole in his head and unconscoiusness threatening and no way to move through the desert even if he does get out.

Charles has become substantially better at moving in and out of his chair since the last time, and so it is that this time, sitting on the edge of the little drop, chair poised to fall into nothing, he doesn’t push forward. He pushes backward, wheels clockwise, and again, until the chair is a good two yards free of the edge. Well clear; this would all be for nothing if he knocked himself over by accident. And then he pushes both palms into the arms of the chair, and shuffles forward, and lowers himself down—first to sit on the little footrest, legs splayed what looks like it should be terribly painfully but what does that matter now?—and then to the ground.

Stage One complete.

The wheelchair rolls easily enough, and Charles does that first. Tugs it easily over to the edge with him. He very much hopes that he can get it to the bottom the right way up, save trying to right it from the ground, but he could probably do that too, if he has to. At the edge, sitting ready to fall, he reaches up, high as he can, doesn’t think about trying and failing to reach the doorhandle, grasps one handle of the chair in both hands, the only one he can reach, and pulls down. It tips back weightily, hard to keep up at first and then suddenly tipping past its point of balance. And holding it that way, front wheels up in the air, Charles pushes it over the edge.

His elbows slam down hard—the weight of the chair jerking him into the solid floor as he refuses to let go—and for a moment he bites into his lips hard, winded, elbows aching like they’ve shattered, head pounding with oh-god-can’t-breathe-this-again-can’t-do-it - but then he releases his death grip on the handles, and feels the edge of the floor, and feels across to where it is flat, and pushes himself up, and doesn’t fall.

The wheelchair sits, still and heavy, on the lower level, the ground level, the door level, upright on its wheels.

Charles looks at it, and breathes in, and breathes out. He breathes again, in, and out. His palms are flat on the floor, and he pushes down again, and his elbows ache a little but they don’t feel broken, with the shock receding. His shoulders hurt, and his elbows hurt, and his chest hurts, but…nothing broken. No blood. Still breathing.

Stage Two complete.

Dragging himself the few feet over to the stair is easy enough; Charles can’t feel the part of his body that’s dragging on the ground, so the friction doesn’t bother him; the pressure on his wrists and elbows and shoulders of dragging himself is no different to dragging himself in and out of his chair, in and out of bed, in and out of the shower. He hasn’t gone down the stairs before, not on his hands, but it’s really no different a movement to lowering himself out of his chair, and not nearly so far. On the edge, he almost makes the potentially-fatal mistake—he almost goes right on ahead, lowers down the part of his body he remembers, leaves his legs where they are—but he’s in his right mind, this time, he’s not going to make those mistakes, and he does a last dangers check, and thinks, and stops—if his legs are still up here, how will he keep his balance on the second step?

Charles hooks his hands under his knees, and lifts them down to the step—heavy, but not far. Getting the rest of himself down is easy. The next step needs a little more balance, and his balance is shaky at best, but he clenches down on his stomach muscles, reminds himself that the bullet _wasn’t_ higher and he _can_ do this—and stays stable as his legs go down another step, lifts himself after them. Once more, legs then himself, and then—and then he’s on the floor, at ground level, where the door used to be.

Stage Three complete.

Only one step to go.

Charles drags himself to his chair first, because it’s right there by the little stairway, and he’ll have better leverage to attack the wall safely seated in his chair than balancing precariously atop his legs on the floor. Into the chair is something he does every day now, though only rarely from the floor, a thing that was so unattainable sitting here last time. It’s a little more demanding now than on an average day, sore from the little fall at the top getting the chair down, but nothing impossible.

He wheels over to the wall—collects the knife and the pan on the way through, sits them in his lap—wheels the last two yards with one hand, the other dragging the chair by one leg. Up close, here in front of him, the wall doesn’t look so flimsy as he tried not to imagine it lying in bed with Erik hours ago. It doesn’t look thin, weak, likely to crumple or split—and of course it doesn’t, it didn’t look that way from up the stairs, either. Charles takes a second to stick to sane. If it doesn’t work, it doesn’t matter.

His hopes aren’t up, aren’t raised, aren’t tilting toward optimism. This is a lie of course, but it’s an important one. He wipes his palms on the grey jogging pants that came from Erik, like everything else he has here. Sweating palms. Well. His hopes _aren’t_ raised. If the wall won’t even dent, then he can drag everything back to the staircase, lift it back to the room level. Tiring, but doable. He can drag himself back up the stairs and he can, somehow, drag his wheelchair back up. Erik won’t be back for a couple of days, at least, so he’ll have time, to take breaks. Erik will never even know he tried.

If the worst case happens, and the wall dents but won’t break, then that too will be fine. Erik will probably be furious, and so be it. Erik can yell or plead or argue all he wants. Charles doesn’t believe that Erik will hurt him—can’t believe, perhaps, but also doesn’t, logically—Erik has never hurt him deliberately. Locking him up here was his ultimate response, when Charles betrayed him. If the wall dents but won’t break, then Charles will leave the things down here—no point in bothering to bring them back up—and drag just himself back up, and wait.

And if the best case happens—if the wall breaks? Then he will go, and go as far and as fast as he can, but that is not to think about now. His hopes aren’t up, aren’t raised, even if that’s a lie, because Charles knows better than most, than any perhaps that a mind can be poisoned as surely as a body. Charles knows that if this doesn’t work, he has a life to live out here, at least for another interminable while. If this doesn’t work, then he will bear it.

Charles lays the knife down on the ground by the chair—try that last, some attendant risk of it slipping or bouncing and cutting him—and picks up the heavy metal pan.

***

The kids are outside, out the lab window. This is probably an awful idea, leaving them out there with no one out to supervise, but they are perfectly visible through the window, and firmly forbidden to stray further than that. Declan is levitating a rock for the others to chase, and Hank is 90% sure it’s going to hit someone in the head before the game’s over, but that’s kids. Elliot’s already hit two trees trying to fly after it; there is some little mercy in the kid not being able to move fast in the air yet.

He turns one eye, at least, away from the 'students'. “So? What’s up?”

Alex, Sean and Hank are sitting on the other side of the window, the inside; the door is locked shut. Hank has no idea what’s going on.

The other two exchange glances.

Hank growls. “You were covering before. You did see agents in town.”

“No!” Sean throws both hands up. “Cross my heart. Nothing like that.”

“Well, then?”

Alex traces one finger around the circle set into his shirt, then looks Hank in the eye with more than half a challenge. “We think we should be ready to fight. Possibly even make the kids ready to fight, or at least to flee and hide.”

“Not that we want to fight ‘cause we don’t, especially Alex, but we were talking, or he was talking, and he thinks—we think—“

“Lensherr’s putting together an army. He obviously doesn’t think the kids are old enough. But he’s going to eventually, right? He’s got to come for them. Maybe for us too. Try to get us all to fight. Help with his war. Whatever it is.”

“Whatever he’s putting together the army for,” Sean adds.

Hank waits. No more is forthcoming. “And?”

Alex’s face tightens. “I don’t care what Xavier would think. I don’t care about this being his house or whatever. He’s done crap to stop whatever’s going on, and I’m not cool with that. Lensherr comes back here with Raven and the teleporter and whoever else they’ve gathered, their fifty people or whatever it’s up to now, I’m not going to just stand down or whatever. Whatever his plan is, it’s stupid, and they’re not getting the kids back. And I’m not fighting anyone’s war. And if I have to fight them for that, well—I’d rather fight Lensherr’s ‘army’ thing on my own terms than go along with him fighting the whole world or something.”

There’s a brief silence—Sean nods a few times, then, belatedly, offers, “Yeah. Same here.” Another pause. “We beat Shaw, didn’t we?” And—“Alex said that. Reminded me of that.”

Hank watches the two of them for several moments—turns his head to watch the kids out the window again. Declan is forbidden from levitating his ‘classmates’, but someone has realised that if he levitates the rock with someone hanging on, he can carry them at least a little way. Tiny little Jill rolls to the ground, laughing wildly, and tosses the rock back to what appears to be becoming a queue for rides. Decky’s practically glowing at the attention.

Alex rocks back on his chair, lets the front legs hit the floor. “Well?”

Hank smiles a bit, shrugs. “I’ve been working on a plastic that he won’t be able to break with metal, for—well, since…March, so—for three months.”

Alex and Sean both look at the array of _things_ cluttering the lab.

Hank shrugs again. “So yeah. I guess we’re all on the same page. It seems pretty clear that Erik’s working on something to do with fighting against—normal-powered people. In general. That’s pretty stupid.”

Alex rocks back on his chair. “You didn’t say you were doing that.”

“I’m doing lots of things. You didn’t ask.”

Alex crosses his arms on his chest. “Well?”

“Well what?”

Sean kicks Alex in the shin, not very hard. “What else are you working on?”

Hank looks around the room. “Well…” Most of it is not very easy to explain. Sean and Alex are his family, his life, and he’d never wish to replace them, but he does miss, just occasionally (sort of), having other scientists around. “I want to expand the jet. So that we can put all the kids in it, if we need to get out of here fast. I’d like to build another one so we can send two in different directions, especially since ours is still honestly pretty damaged, but it’s hard enough getting materials to make it bigger without pinging anything the CIA would notice. So I’m just trying to fit a bit more seating in the mended one, for now.”

Sean nods. “Sounds good.”

Hank smiles a bit despite himself. “I’ve actually been thinking, I haven’t done anything about it ‘cause really the CIA’s our enemy right now, yeah? Not Erik directly as such. But if you guys think…well, I was thinking, that maybe if I could engineer a magnetic interference field here, it might make it more difficult for him to threaten us, if he were to threaten us.”

“Would that work?”

Hank shrugs. “Maybe.”

“Is there anything we can do to help with it?”

Alex sounds so absolutely willing to do as Hank asks, and Hank tries, desperately, for a moment, to think of something. He shrugs again in the end, feeling a bit lame. “I’ll let you know.”

“Well, we can start teaching the kids to hide.” Sean gestures vaguely out the window.

“I’ll think about the girls. Ari and Alisha.” Two more girls now, not just the two. “I don’t want to just go ahead and teach them to fight people. But I’ll—I’ll think about it. I’ll figure something out.”

“They could be a big difference if we do end up in a confrontation.”

Out the window, Ari is firing little bursts of force, of pressure at Will, who is shielding them off, bouncing them back at Ari, who deflects them back with more tiny bursts. Hank stands and starts unlocking the window—the game will be all well and good until all the deflected force builds up and is too much for one of them to turn back.

Alex sticks his head out before Hank had fully opened the glass. “Both of you duck! Ari and Will!”

Not the most well-considered approach, perhaps, and Hank flinches for a moment as both children’s heads turn, still standing straight—but they're used to following Alex’s orders, practising the more dangerous end of their skills with him out the end of the orchard, and they both duck in time for the two little snowballs of energy to fly over Will’s head and crash shudderingly into a tree some yards behind him.

“Woaaaaaaah,” breathes Sean.

The two actually look pretty sheepish, surprisingly. Alex is hanging halfway out the window and for a moment, briefly, he reminds Hank painfully of Charles doing the same thing, yelling instructions out into the garden.

“What’s our deal?” The question isn’t particularly gentle.

Ari glances at her brother, then back at Alex. “The stuff you teach me, I only do how you tell me, or you won’t.”

“The things I teach you, you only do in the ways I’ve said, or I won’t teach you anymore.”

“But we did that with you!” Will pipes up.

“And what did I say about it?” Hank cringes a little at the sarcasm in Alex’s tone.

Will looks at his feet. “Only with you there.”

“When you say,” Ari adds.

“‘Cause otherwise someone might get hurt!” Alisha offers from over where there is still something going on with the levitating rock.

Little Ari glares at her.

Alex sighs very-nearly theatrically. “Is anyone going to do it again?”

Two—three, in fact—little heads shaking earnest ‘no’s.

Hank keeps his lips firmly shut—and then sees Sean over Alex’s bent back, and Sean has a hand clamped over his mouth, Alex halfway out the window and making stern faces at his kids, and Hank meets Sean’s eyes and both of them burst out laughing.

***

The first thing is the jolt along his arms—Charles’s arms are stronger, much, now than they’ve ever been, lifting him in and out of the chair, dragging himself around his very tiny world here. The impact is greater than he expects, and it vibrates, shudders up his arms like falling from a height.

The second thing is the sound—metal on metal, and the pan rings like a bell, and the wall hits like a car collision. Things are tremendously quiet here, always; the ocean far away at the bottom of the cliffs, the birds calling occasionally, the tourists far too far away to make an audible sound. The sound echoes, or doesn’t echo, as such, but rings in Charles’s ears, the sudden tear in the quiet.

The third thing is the sizeable dent in the wall—not quite a crumple, as such—but a dramatic pan-shaped indent, like it didn’t occur to Erik that taking most of the metal out of the metal wall would reduce its thickness and thus its strength. Maybe he didn’t think Charles could take the stairs. Maybe he thinks the desert is its own barrier. Maybe he meant to fix it when they got up, and then they didn’t. Maybe he hasn’t thought about it at all.

The wall is thin, thin like it didn’t look, thin like Charles didn’t let himself think—hope.

He sets his shoulders, sets his jaw, and swings the pan again.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> (I reread the relevant chapters of the previous fic before I edited this today, and was just like...WELL THIS IS DEPRESSING X'D I will actually never get over Charles trying to reach that bloody door handle lol. At least he hasn't split his head this time :D)


	10. Chapter 10

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Greetings from Tokyo! Didn't get a chance to post this before I left, so taking a quiet moment out of the morning to post it now! The cherry blossoms are beautiful and I'm having a fantastic time here, though feet are very sore--if any of you have ever tried to navigate Shinjuku Station, you'll understand :P Not sure whether I'll have a chance to post another chapter while I'm over here - tethering an Internet connection from my phone right now, which is probably a little pricey on overseas roaming X'D But if I get wifi somewhere, I'll post another chapter next week. Otherwise see you guys when I get back in two weeks :D

2.

3.

The impact through his grip and wrists and shoulders; the sound, unmuffled and unheard by the desert.

4—and swing back, 5, and—6.

Breathe in, out, in, out, and—

7.

8…9…

10.

Wipe one hand on Erik’s stupid grey jogging pants, the other, fix grip, tight, and—

11.

12.

And oh.

And—

13 through the wall, splitting like sharp-edged paper, a paper cut each side of his hand, thin on the back, sharper on the heel, but what’s a paper-cut?

Tug the pan back through.

14 down on the base of the tear—

A little larger, a little, but not an efficient break. Charles sets the pan on the chair, wipes his hands on Erik’s horrible grey jogging pants, leans over, picks up the knife. Wrap both hands around—less likely to slip.

Force the blade through—tearing nothing like paper, so slowly, so slowly, separating cells. Pan was faster.

Charles shifts the knife a little—what he needs is a hook, he thinks, but he doesn’t have a hook. So he hooks the wide end of the blade down through the hole, so it won’t pull back through, so it’s stuck—and then pulls. Pull—pull—and it’s through, a nick on the fronts of his fingers where the corner of the wide end of the blade slams into the hands that hold it and even now, even like this, the pan was faster.

The dining chair is bigger than the pan.

Shoulders are sore, arms are sore, but the chair’s not so heavy, really. Charles hoists it to shoulder height—too awkward—then over his head, space there to swing, holding on to the legs and the seat, and down, smash the top, the chair-back down like the pan and punch through, through the sides of the hole, blow it open, big enough to push the chair through, almost, maybe, in a few more goes, if he had to.

He doesn’t have to push a chair through—he has to push a wheelchair through. At ground level. He could fit now, if he could walk. No point thinking that way now, though. Erik won’t be back for two days, at least. The top of the chair is splintered a little, but that’s alright. Hoist it up, over his head, smash it down.

When the chair’s too heavy, back to the pan.

22.

23, 24…25.

26.

Hands are sore, but hands can be sore tomorrow, the next day, whenever he’s reached somewhere with a phone.

27.

2—drop the pan. Only a small obstacle. Wipe hands on Erik’s horrible jogging pants. Pick up the pan.

28.

29.

Could fit a chair now, maybe. Could almost stick his head and shoulders out. Probably not smart yet. Sharp edges.

30.

31.

Might be worth looking out, check there’s not a hidden fence, wall, something—widen out the sides, then.

32 to the left, pull the shoulder a little, only a small obstacle.

33 to the right.

Big enough now, yes, for head and shoulders. Head first, easy, then push through—a little pain, but no big deal—and it’s there, really there, the desert, stretching away into sky. A desert full of birds and occasionally tourists. No wall, no fence, no metal. Sand and sand and rock. Sky with ground attached. A way to go. A way out.

Pull shoulders back through. No out if the hole doesn’t grow. More pain, more on the way back in, but only a small obstacle. There’s a way out through the hole. Put the pan down, hoist the chair again.

34.

35.

Hoist it high and slam it down 36.

It’s been—ten minutes? No watch, and the clock’s the other way. Ten minutes, maybe. Maybe twenty, or thirty. Maybe only five? Probably ten. And half a hole, a third of a hole—a third of the way there? A hole in twenty minutes then, or a few hours at most. And Erik won’t be back for days, 2 days, maybe even 3, or 4. 2 days across the desert, three days across the desert, four. Far enough not to be found. Far enough to find people, real people. Call the police, or maybe not, definitely not, no, maybe call the boys—Hank should still have an aircraft. Home. 2 days, or 3, or 4, then home. Going home.

37, and up, 38, and up, 39—up to shoulder height—higher, where it can swing—

40.

And back to the pan.

41.

***

“We’re having a school meeting today,” Hank begins, trying to sound confident, “Because we need to talk about something.”

Alex raises an eyebrow that is not at all subtle about saying ‘no shit’. Hank ignores him.

The kids are clustered more or less together on the couches. Will and Decky are propped up back to back against each other on the floor, because fitting eight kids on a couch and an armchair is tricky.

“‘Lisha. Stop poking Milton.”

Alex sounds every bit the proper actual teacher. Hank mostly resists looking back at Sean to grin. “Okay guys. So.” Deep breath. “How many of you had people, where you come from, who knew about what you can do?”

Maggie, of course, puts up her hand—of course, since no one here has the faintest what she can do. So does Milton, hesitantly, and Ari, though Will tries to pull her hand down again. Eliot’s hand is up, and Alisha’s. Most of them Hank already knows. Alisha’s parents left her on the steps of the local pound. She insists that they knew she loves dogs. Hank hasn’t really tried to correct her. Ari was given to a church to be exorcised. Will found her.

Hank gives the room at large a general sort of smile. “Right. And the rest of you decided not to tell anyone?”

“I tried,” Declan scowls.

“But people weren’t—nice, about it?”

“Didn’ believe me.”

“Right. And Milton, and Ari, and Will, and Alisha, people weren’t very nice about yours when they found out. Which wasn’t okay. Because people—should be nice.”

“They didn’t know about me.” Will, quiet.

“He was the good twin,” Ari clarifies.

“You’re both good twins,” Hank—corrects, he supposes.

“My mum was worried,” Elliot admits.

Elliot is the only child whose parents knew and kept him—it took some getting at, but they established, some time in Spring, that Raven had actually taken him from his mother. Not kidnapped, nothing like that, thank god, but talked the poor woman into handing over her son. Promised that she could take care of Elliot better than his own mother; promised that she could deal with him waking up in the morning mid-air.

In some ways, she probably wasn’t wrong. It’s hard to tell from the recollections of a six-year-old, but the woman was probably at her wits’ end. Must have been, to agree to this. Hank doesn’t think Raven was right—Elliot was going to school, safely, and probably would have continued to do so until he was old enough to manage himself. So long as his mother didn’t decide to go to a doctor, or, god forbid, a government agency, because there are feelers starting to go out now. Slowly, quietly, for now, but it’s coming. Erik’s band of angry mutants are not going to be the only people ‘recruiting’ for long. And Hank doubts there’ll be much of a future for any mutants who unwittingly hand themselves over to the CIA.

“I decided not to tell anyone.” In many ways, Jill is perhaps the most mature of the children, tiny though she is. Only seven, barely three feet, but always watching, everywhere.

“And so did Elliot’s mom,” Hank agrees. “Who knows why that might be?”

“‘Cause people suck.” Will is stoic.

Declan actually hi-fives him, and Hank tries not to groan. “Because some people don’t react well to us being different. Lots of people are fine, but it’s hard to know which ones won’t be. So we need to be careful, for now.”

“People suck,” Declan agrees with a nod, and a smile back at Will. He’s forceful about it, where Will was just sad.

Alex nudges Hank, comes up beside him. “Some people suck, yeah. But what about Elliot’s mom? She was pretty cool.”

“My mum will always love me,” Elliot nods earnestly.

Hank sort of wants to kill Raven, just a little bit. They can’t send him back now. He uses his power too much. How could they make a kid that young see the need to keep it all in? And god forbid Raven and Erik and co should find him there.

“And Beast and Banshee and I have met some okay people. We worked with some people for a bit who tried really hard to help us out.”

“Why not anymore?” Ari asks.

“‘Cause they turned bad,” Milton answers.

Hank tries not to let the horror show. God but they should have had this talk sooner.

Alex looks the kid dead on. “You know that?”

Milton shrugs. “’S what Mystique and Magneto said when I went from home. Bad people turned on you guys.”

Of course. Well.

“They got it wrong,” Alex smiles, not very nicely.

Hank prods him hard in the back. “You guys know how stories get jumbled sometimes. What happened, is some not very nice people stopped our friends from helping us. And some of our other friends made them safe somewhere else, so that’s alright. But the point is, there are good people, who don’t mind that we’re different.”

Hank stops. How in god’s name is he supposed to do this without tearing that down again?

“But some people, some people are rubbish.” Sean is leaning forward in his chair, every bit like he’s telling a story. “And some of those rubbish people want to find us and be mean. So we want to make sure you guys are mad good at hiding and running away.”

“Just in case,” Hank adds.

“Just in case,” Sean agrees.

Alex stares at Sean, but doesn’t interrupt.

“So,” Sean grins, getting into the swing of things. “Will, if you needed to hide and get away from someone, what would you do?”

The tiny boy meets Sean’s gaze squarely. “I’d hold on to Ari close to me, and shield us from sight.”

Sean smiles back, effortless. Hank is a little bit in awe of that, still. “But you can’t control that all the time, can you?”

Will looks at his sister. “Did it once.”

“What if it didn’t work?”

“What could you do instead?” Hank rephrases quickly. “To have a plan, until we figure out how you can disappear a bit more consistently.”

“All the time,” Sean adds helpfully.

Will bites his lip; glances at his sister again. “I could put us in a big ball of shield and maybe they’d give up?”

“He could put them in a big ball of shield and Ari could knock everyone down and then they could get away,” Declan amends. Ari and Will both glare at him. “What? It’s true!”

Hank nods, once, only a little reluctantly. “You’re right. If there was really a threat, and you were definitely in danger, then that could be something you could do. It’s always better, though, to try to run away first. You don’t want to—knock people down—if you don’t have to. We want more people to think we’re okay, remember. So we don’t ever, ever want to hurt anyone unless we really, really have to.”

“I never did!” Ari looks halfway between furiously indignant and tearful, and Will and Decky are off their butts and on their knees at once, clearly not feeling the threat great enough to need to stand, but making their defence of Will’s sister abundantly clear, glaring daggers at the ‘adults’. Adult and two teenagers.

“I know,” Alex promises.

The little girl nods once, solemnly. The two boys slowly shift back to sitting. “You know?” challenges Declan, pointing an accusing arm at Hank.

Hank blinks once before he pulls himself together enough to manage—“Yes. Yeah. Yes, I know. Of course. Don’t worry.”

He is so not cut out for this.

***

It takes 146 strokes, of the pan and then the chair, the chair and then the pan, to bring the hole down to the ground, wide enough to squeeze the wheelchair through.

The dining chair stays behind, splintered almost down to the seat. The knife and the pan come along, in case there’s anything dangerous in the desert. At the last moment, Charles has a brainwave and saws into the seat’s upholstery, slices off enough to wrap the knife in. The knife goes securely down by one of his thighs, then—both hands free to wheel. The pan squeezes awkwardly in the other side.

Charles carefully lifts his legs with both hands and deposits his feet right in the centre of the footrest to go through the hole, conscious of his mistake last time, doing himself an injury he couldn’t feel. Legs well out of the way of the torn and buckled metal sheeting.

The wheelchair takes the brunt of the sharp edge issue—his hands get a little scratched up, can’t move forward without them, but nothing big, no obstacle at all, now. Same for shoulders, but nothing nearly so bad as when he first stuck head and shoulders through.

And then, without fanfare, Charles is on the other side of the wall.

There’s the sky—the sky like the sky over the sea, but follow it down and it’s not water, just endless land, stretching into the distance, and land he can do, with his chair. In hindsight, he should have thrown food down—it could take a day to reach anyone, Charles thinks. He wasn’t expecting to get through, he supposes. Wasn’t expecting it to work. Doesn’t matter now. He can’t reach the food out of his chair, and he can’t get his chair back up to room level, probably. It shouldn’t be a major obstacle. Travel hard, travel fast, and he’ll be back at food and water and people and telephones before it becomes a problem.

Charles looks back through the hole, just once, because he’s lived here now for—eight months? A lot of that in bed, when he was first healing, but eight months, or thereabouts. It’s home, in a way, if not a good way.

And then he turns, faces forward, and pushes down on his wheels.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thanks for reading :) Please let me know how you're feeling/that you want to kill characters/that you want to kill me/that you have sore feet too/etc XD <3


	11. Chapter 11

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Free wifi at hostel in Kyoto, so here is another chapter :)

The desert stretches out like a sickness; like the night when you can’t sleep; like learning not to try to feel his legs.

It stretches out like it enjoys it, like somewhere, silent and all seeing, the desert is promising not to be conquered so easily, by such a little legless man.

Charles has worked through a score of long nights, academic work, theses, the silly world of brilliant people where sleeplessness is par for the course.

Charles has learned not to try to feel his legs, and come through his body’s months of protests that it cannot survive this, the things he’s done to it, the things Erik has done to it.

Charles is no ordinary man, whether or not he’s little or legless.

Charles presses his palms into his wheels, and keeps pushing.

***

It is early June and in early June, since it is winter (scientifically, though it is still hot in the day), the days will be short. Charles should know what time the sun rises, as he has nothing else to observe, but he can’t quite remember—nine, perhaps. Nine would make sense, for June. Eight would make more. He has no watch, but he thinks that he must have been crossing the desert for three hours, because he has counted, sometimes, and it feels like three. It is—perhaps three in the morning, then, and perhaps five hours until the sunrise. Then, no doubt, he will wish for it to be cold again. Now, though, his hands are shaky, his neck tight with it, with night in the desert, where the rock does not hold heat long.

***

The desert stretches out like a sickness; like a dark infection and dead blood; like the night when your walls are a prison and you cannot see or breathe.

It stretches out like it hates humanity, who build houses on its edges, drive buses through it, somewhere, not here, have little towns in some parts of it, not many.

Charles has lived through sickness, and lived through infection; Charles has lived through the fever that made his back swell like it would consume him and would not yield until Erik took him to another place, another time, another country? He cannot remember. And had him made well.

Charles has lived through walls like prisons and darkness and lungs screaming for air.

Charles loves humanity more than any desert can hate it; more than Erik can hate it, even, and of that he is very sure, and that is why he has to cross the desert.

Charles rubs his hands together three times, no more, though three creates very little in the way of warmth. And then he presses his numb palms into his wheels, and presses down with his arms, and keeps pushing.

***

The sun rises in the desert like a hot poker—like a wash of gold diluted in a river—like the world being born—like the world ending. There is gold and pale, pale green across the sky and there is red on the horizon, screaming into him, into his eyes, where the desert has been pitch black for endless hours—eight hours, maybe.

It will get hot now, Charles knows, but it is not hot yet. Maybe, he thinks, not deliriously, because he is sane this time, entirely sane—maybe summer has ended, and winter has come, it being June, and there will be no heat. Maybe it will keep on freezing through his skin until he finds a frozen town and goes home.

The sun rises, not quickly but not slowly, and it does not bring heat at once, not really, but there is some heat in the directness of it, the burn of it. Charles shuts his eyes, because the desert is flat, mostly, and keeps pushing.

***

The desert stretches out like a sickness; like a fever refusing to sweat out; like his spine insisting it wasn’t meant to be like this, and his skin shrinking off his body, and the 80% of his body that he knows is made from water sweating out entirely until he curls into soaking sheets like a tiny, shrivelled child and begs for the world to let him go, for a mind to take him in, until he flows into other minds and other places and times and sinks into other worlds and other futures and goes home, home, home to a wife and children, home to a fiancee who doesn’t appreciate bird watching, home to Raven, and she’ll be worried, though she’ll scream his ears bloody, home to Erik, to Erik, and Erik will carry him and then he won’t have to push anymore, Erik will hold him and sink into all the empty places in him and make him strong, make him worth something, make his power mean something and everything in the world and love him, love him like Erik has never had the chance, let Charles love him like Charles has loved a million people from a distance but never, never like this.

***

It is eleven in the morning, Charles has decided for no very good reason at all. The sun is in the right place in the sky, he thinks—or maybe the sun says that it’s ten? He knows this. He knew these things. Knows.

It is hot, because it’s June, and in the desert in the tour guide’s mind it is hot until most of the way through June and it is still early June, or not far into June. Charles’s skin is pink, and he should have brought Erik’s stupid ugly jogging sweater but he didn’t think, didn’t think he’d make it, probably, he thinks, he remembers. He puts the pan on his head for a few minutes, holds it there, but it gets hotter and hotter and he throws it away. He doesn’t need it for protection anymore: it is day now, and desert things are safe in the day. Coyotes. Desert mice.

***

The desert stretches out like a sickness; like a deep burn that blisters every inch of skin so that nothing can be touched, and nothing can touch, and there is nothing, like walls and water and space and the things that come between people, always come between people, even when things seem to be going so well, even when their minds are so in synch, things always come between. things always drift apart. Like burns.

The desert laughs, loudly, and laughs, and laughs, and laughs, and laughs, and laughs, and laughs, and laughs

Charles pushes, with the upholstery from around the knife wrapped around his hands.

***

It is one in the afternoon, Charles has decided, though the minds on the bus disagree.

There is a thing in the distance—maybe it is the sickness, creeping, a tumour and a scar in the heart of the world—maybe it is the finger of the desert, running along its own cheek, tracing a way home. Maybe it is not real—

But the minds are real, one and two and three and four and five—the tour guide! Who knows that it’s hot until late June, and he was right, very right, so right—

—and Charles stands up, and waves his arms, and says “I’m here! Take me home!”

  


  


**Notes for the Chapter:**

> So, selfish ranty A/N time: I've had a pretty emotionally tough last few days, and not much of a chance to process it, being very busy doing fabulous things in Japan (which is still amazing, don't get me wrong). But the great thing about writing is that it gives everything a silver lining, because without hard days you can't write hard stories. And even though these chapters were written months ago and the stuff I'm writing now will be chapters in the late twenties, working on this story reminds me of that (the silver linings thing ;D). Having the fuel to write doesn't necessarily make the things we go through worth it, but it does offer one way to take what's done to you and transform at least some of it out and away from you, into the world as something good. Thought for the day :)
> 
> Anyhow, love you guys, comments make me super happy even when I don't have Internet/crazy-holiday-time to reply to them right away XD Oh, and I remain, as always, very sorry for doing awful things to characters, but also not sorry at all - I solemnly swear I will fix them eventually :)


	12. Chapter 12

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Okay, first and foremost - this chapter could be triggery for some people. Not in a different way to the rest of the fic (or series), but probably a little bit more intensely than other chapters. Want to know more, scroll down the bottom, I'll elaborate in end notes :)
> 
> 2nd, I have a bit of a favour to ask you guys :) Most of you know I'm working on my PhD; right now I'm conducting a survey of fic-readers' thoughts and feelings about reading and writing noncon and issues of consent. I'll put the full spiel, as it were, down the bottom; this is just a quick note to say that if you have time to take the survey, I'd really appreciate it :) <3
> 
> On with the story!

“Mister?”

Agapeto Aviles pokes gingerly at the man’s chest—it looks relatively safe.

“Mister Charles? You are Mister Charles, yes?”

It is a miracle he even spotted the guy—sitting in the desert in a wheelchair flailing his arms a bit. How he got so far…well. A cautionary tale, Peto supposes. Don’t go off into the desert in a wheelchair.

He is breathing, at least. Downright disturbing otherwise, but breathing. The rest will mend. Peto apologises again to his passengers, a huddle murmuring quietly from a few paces back. They were very helpful getting the man into the bus; they’ll understand having to turn around. At least the urgency is obvious. He'll still have to give them their money back, probably. Damn it.

The cloth on the man’s brow is already hot. Peto takes it with him to the front of the bus, wets it again from the canteen. “Oh-kaaaay.” He turns to face his charges. “I am so so very sorry for the inconvenience today, but we must take this man to town, I think.”

Most of the passengers nod; one man looks rather cross, but doesn’t speak up. 

“I can hold the cloth on his forehead,” one woman offers, eyes wide, frowning gently at the poor guy sprawled over two seats.

The wheelchair is already in the back of the bus. “Thank you very much,” Peto agrees. “Please be seated, ladies and gentlemen.”

And he turns the bus around, and heads back to civilisation.

  


***

  


The bus trip is long: oversize tyres on a road that is barely a road, dust either side and the subtle vibrato of the ground being never quite smooth.

The wet cloth that is all anyone can do for the body in the bus keeps getting hot, and the woman holding it wets it again and again with the water they brought with them, leaving almost before light this morning, to have a full day in the Atacama. It is too much, she thinks—for a man already missing his legs, his independence, really, a man already stuck in a chair to end up like this, whatever this is, bloody and feverish and burned and barely breathing with dust sticking to everything.

The bus trip is long and the man, the body, takes shallow breaths, and does not move, but does not die.

  


***

  


Charles awakes with very few thoughts—but a warmth, a goodness, in his chest, in his mouth, in his hands, in his ankles and wrists and cheeks. He is going home. He is going home.

He opens his eyes slowly, and without expectations—he was pushing the chair? And he was going home. And—

He is in the room with no windows.

There is wall to the left, and the cabinet there, and wall to the right, if he strains his eyes over that way, and the chair in the corner. The doctor isn’t there; he can’t feel the doctor there. The doctor could be in the underground, perhaps. He will be up soon, no doubt, for more lessons with the chair. Dr. Calker is pleased, Charles thinks, with their progress; soon, perhaps, Charles will be able to use the chair on his own, and he and Erik will go back to Raven, and Calker will be able to go home.

Charles shuts his eyes again—they are dry. He should call the doctor—he could fix that. The doctor might be doing something, though, and he should stay away from the doctor’s mind, and dry eyes are not really a big enough problem to call the doctor…

Charles opens his eyes again. They hurt. So does his skin. His head hurts—and his throat is dry. Maybe the doctor is a good idea. The radio is…not on the table. Has he knocked it to the floor, perhaps?

“Charles.”

Erik. Charles lets out a long breath. Good.

“Charles?”

Charles croaks a smile. “Hi. I—thirsty.”

Erik comes into view in parts—Charles can’t quite find the energy to lift his head, and everything hurts when he tries to use his arms. Erik’s head comes into view as he stands up, distantly—then he's there, by the bed, and that is some of him.

“I’m going to put an arm under your back, Charles. So that you can sit up a little and drink.”

His arm slides under slowly, and it isn’t sore, which is good, and Erik, and good. Charles feels so very tired.

“Alright?”

Charles tries to swallow, then gives up.

“Is this alright?”

Oh. “Mm. Umgh.”

Erik sighs. “Alright. Right.”

The glass feels a little weird against Charles’s bottom lip—so dry, really, soooo dry—and then water, god yes, trickling over his lips and over his tongue and into his mouth and then he tries to gulp and knocks his teeth into the glass and then there is water on his chin and his hands but that's alright too.

“Slowly.”

Charles blinks. Then the water comes back and oh, oh yes.

“Slowly, Charles.”

Water, mmm water, cool, and wet, and oh yeah. No gulping, don’t want to lose the water.

“Damnit.”

Charles blinks again. “Hmm?” The water spills a bit—no talking, right, walking—no, pushing—no, no drinking, drinking, water. Mm.

A quiet sigh. Erik. Mm, yes, Erik. Good.

“Nothing. Nothing, Charles. Nothing at all.”

***

Charles awakes and everything hurts. Not the way everything hurt when his back broke, when there was burning there for so long and doctors and space and time and medicine and Erik cutting away the fabric to try to mend him, always trying to mend things, Erik, always trying, until—

Until he locked Charles in a house on the edge of the desert in Peru.

Charles opens his eyes very slowly.

Blank wall. His limp legs under blankets down the bed.

His bedroom. In the house on the edge of the desert in Peru.

 _Everything_ hurts.

“Hi.”

Erik.

Charles takes a steadying breath in—even that hurts, a bit. The air is hot, too dry.

“Can you hear me, Charles?”

“How did you find me?” It comes out as less a question than a croak, and less a croak than a whisper.

“The tour operator works for me, Charles. He operates tours for _me_ so that _you_ have minds to play with. Did you really think I wouldn’t have mentioned to him that if he found a crazy man trying to cross the desert in a wheelchair, he should be returned to this address?”

Charles processes that. “I should have taken his mind.”

“But you didn’t, thank god.” Erik’s tone does not suggest that he was joking about ‘crazy’. “Damnit Charles, you almost killed yourself!”

“I almost got out of here.”

Charles can see Erik, now—just a little turn of the head to the left and there he is, sitting by the bed, scowling at the opposite wall. “Anything you want, Charles, I can give you _anything_ you want.”

Charles has to smile a little, because Erik has to know that is a lie, surely. “Freedom.”

The quick huff of breath out through his nose. “I can give you _almost_ anything you want.”

“I don’t want anything else.”

“Then you should have thought of that before you started acting like a child, running around trying to get people killed.”

“Funny. I thought you were the one planning to kill people?”

Erik doesn’t groan, or sigh, or huff—just sits, as he always has. Charles shuts his eyes again—they are still painfully dry.

“I brought you some more genetics magazines. Journals.”

Charles doesn’t dignify that blatant attempt at currying favour with a response.

“You won’t be able to move for a while. You’re too badly burned, and the stitches in your leg need not to be pulled. I thought you might need some reading material.”

“Why?” Charles affects a shrug, which hurts. “I’m not a professor of genetics anymore. I’m just a crazy man in a wheelchair living on the edge of a cliff on the edge of a desert on the edge of the world.”

Erik ignores him.

“Did you kill the tour guide?”

“What?” Erik sounds genuinely surprised, which is promising. “He picked you up, stopped you dying, called me immediately and kept you alive until I got there. Why would I kill him?”

“You’ve gotten very secretive.”

Erik snorts something that isn’t much at all like a laugh. “I promised him a cash reward to do exactly as I asked if this situation should ever arise. He did, I’ve given him his reward and if you ever do it again, which I would not even imagine as a possibility except that you are completely mad, I am confident that he will do the same thing again should he find you.”

Charles considers this. There are positives. No one died. No one but he has been hurt. He knew that this probably wouldn’t work. He abandoned that pessimism once he broke through the wall, perhaps, but—but he can cope with this. He crossed the desert, or part of it, in a wheelchair, and has lived through everything he and Erik have done to his body, and earned his doctorate in genetics from Oxford University at twenty-nine years old, and he can cope with this.

By the bed, Erik stands. “I’m going to take a walk and try to stop being angry with you. There’s water there on the table. You’re on IV fluids, don’t even think about pulling them out, but you should drink some too for your throat and lips.” He has paced the short length of the room twice. “If your hands are too sore, I’ll be back soon, don’t push yourself. And don’t move.” He stops, then—leans over a little, tries to look at Charles. Charles can see him through the slits of his eyes. He doesn’t open them the rest of the way. He doesn’t want to see. “I mean it, Charles. You’re burned to blisters all over and your leg has a hole in it. Just stay there. Please.”

And then he is gone, the door shutting behind him.

Charles takes a deep breath, and lets it out again, even though it hurts.

Water does sound like a good plan. His hands, he discovers when he lifts one, are bandaged almost to shapelessness. Experimentally, he presses the ‘fingers’ of one to the palm—or where the palm would be—of the other—then jerks them away, at the sharp sting of it. He could probably balance the cup between his hands, but it’d hurt. He can’t lean over far enough to sip from it on the table, not without holding his weight on his arms, which are likewise thickly bandaged.

Sunburn, he realises, after thinking it through a minute. He was out in the desert sun for hours, and his pale skin isn’t built for that sort of sunshine. Back of his neck, top of his back, his face, god his face, the top of his chest, the tops of his hands, his arms from high on the bicep all the way to his fingertips. Probably the tops of his feet, too, though he’ll never feel that and he can’t see it under the blanket and probably more bandages.

The palms of his hands, his fingers, won’t be sunburned, but they're probably rubbed raw from pushing the chair. Ahhh and from breaking the wall—he cut himself a few times, maybe, on the metal—on the knife, perhaps? Did he use the knife? And there might have been splinters, and perhaps blisters, bruises. The blisters probably burst and then were torn up.

His headache is dehydration, of course, the dry eyes, dry throat, thick, heavy tongue. Beating headache. Throbbing headache. IV fluids will take care of all that, slowly. Some water by the mouth would be nice too, but Erik said he’d help when he comes back.

That is most of his upper body; his shoulders are sore, but that's obvious, the breaking the wall down, the wheeling himself across the desert—and it is a dull ache under the burns. His stomach muscles are roughly the same.

That leaves only his legs, which are probably just his no-longer-usable legs, except that Erik said one of them has a hole in it. Charles can’t explain that one. His hands are too sore to pull his leg out, but a few minutes of sporadic nudging at the blankets shifts them clear of his right leg. It seems to be the right one that's damaged—there is a large section of his thigh thickly bandaged. Getting at whatever is underneath—stitches, Erik mentioned stitches—would require unfastening the end of the bandage, unwinding it, removing whatever dressing is underneath…and he has no working hands.

Charles lets his energy go—sinks back into the pillows, though he hasn’t really moved any noteworthy amount. He doesn’t bother nudging the blankets back. He’ll have to ask Erik what happened there. It doesn’t matter much, he supposes, but Charles feels he should know what happened to his body—he doesn’t have much control left over his life, and that makes remaining master of his body, what is left of it, the more important.

The water seems a very long way away. If Erik has really brought journals, which he probably has, they aren’t in Charles’s immediate eye-line. He is hungry, he realises—when did he last eat? But the IVs are probably taking care of the important parts of that, too. Nothing he can do about it, regardless. Nothing he can do about anything, in fact.

God his face hurts.

He wishes, vaguely, that he were a long way under the sea, and deliberately does not think about the salt involved in that proposition.

He thinks about being under the sea—about cold, and dark, and wet—and then Charles shuts his eyes, settles in to wait, and tries very hard to think of nothing.

***

Charles awakes from a dream of water, and everything is dry.

Erik is back by the bed. Charles isn’t delirious anymore, or he doesn’t think he is, and he isn’t surprised by this. Erik’s presence.

Erik isn’t watching, really, and Charles croaks a quiet sound until Erik looks up and reaches for the glass of water on the table.

Charles doesn’t look at Erik, but he drinks the whole glass of water.

When he is done, Erik puts the glass back, and does watch; stares, for several moments.

Charles shuts his eyes again.

“I want you to look at something.”

Replying might be more appealing had the water had more of an effect on his throat.

“I’ll be back.”

The door to the bedroom opening; not shutting, just footsteps, then, not long and footsteps coming back again. The soft clunk of metal touching down.

“Look.”

Charles squeezes his eyes tightly once before blinking them open.

“Here.”

‘Here’ requires an effort—eyes strained too far to the left. Erik comes closer, tonelessly—“here, let me, you’ll hurt yourself”—and wraps both palms so, so carefully around Charles’s head, only the parts thickly covered by hair, the parts barely even aching. Something from the table—a cloth, wet—and it is surreal, to be handled like this, but comforting, because _everything_ hurts and his left cheek stings at the contact when Erik lowers his head to the pillow but the water, the damp is so good, better than the sting.

Erik takes a step back, and his exhibit hovers closer, and Charles can see now, with his face tilted in the right direction. Erik hovers Charles’s wheelchair by the bed.

“Look at this.”

The seat is sticky with it; thick. Caked and layered like oil paint in hyper-realist colours, the fake blood used once upon a time in grade school plays from gelatine and red dye and treacle so that the wounded tasted like sweet and syrup.

“Where was I bleeding?”

Erik's mouth goes tight. "You stabbed yourself in the thigh. Deeply. And not just once."

Ahh. The stitches, etcetera. Charles makes to nod and thinks better of it. "I didn't feel it."

Charles thinks he hears Erik's teeth grind together. "Half an inch from the artery, Charles." Erik's glare never intimidated Charles, not even in the very beginning. "Half an inch more idiocy and you'd have bled out in the desert, you'd be dead, and—" he subsides abruptly, lips pressed together, face furious.

Charles doesn't shrug. "Half an inch more 'idiocy' in my back and I wouldn't have the dignity even of sitting up. Or I could be dead. There are vital organs, within half an inch of where it hit me. Arteries, even."

Erik breathes in, breathes out. His throat is corrugated with hard tendons. "It was a mistake."

"So was stabbing myself in the leg."

***

Charles is not sure how long he has been awake, this time; he will not resort to counting seconds.

Erik's eyes are shut, but he's not sleeping.

Charles swallows—still dry. "You mentioned journals."

Erik is awake immediately, nods, sits forward, as though this could be the key to fixing everything between them. Charles is only almost certain that Erik is not that delusional. "Five of the ones I brought you at New Year's. The others didn't have new issues since then."

Charles doesn't bother confirming that. "I'd like to read."

Erik only goes as far as the cabinet, and returns with a small stack. He holds out the top volume as he sits. _Genetics in Medicine._

Charles almost reaches out—gets as far as raising one hand.

Erik shakes his head once. "I'll hold it for you."

This is a ridiculous proposition, because it will take several hours to read the whole issue, which Charles will do, because there is nothing else to do. Erik cannot possibly hold the thing there in front of his face for several hours. But this is Erik, and he's flicking to the first article, then back to the table of contents, and leaning forward to hold the pages one-handed in front of Charles's face.

Charles is blinking compulsively before he can make out even the first title.

There is something deeply, vastly horrifying, about not being able to read—more so than his hands, or the unfelt wound in his thigh, or even, perhaps, his legs.

"What's wrong?"

Charles's eyes are squeezed shut, but Erik sounds like he's frowning.

Charles takes a breath, then another. Licks his lips, to little effect. “I—it will have to wait. It’s not just my hands. My eyes hurt too much.”

Erik is silent a moment. “I’ll read it to you.”

Charles squeezes his eyes a little tighter, and doesn’t open them to look sceptical.

“I will not have you lose your mind again.”

Charles coughs a laugh at that, not hysterical, not quite. “I’m not going to help you.”

“So you’ve said.” Utterly unconcerned.

“You won’t make me change my mind.”

“I can’t imagine I will.”

Charles breathes in; breathes out. It hurts a little less than it did yesterday; a lot more than breathing should.

Erik waits, implacable.

“Fine. Read me something.”

And Erik frowns a little, and re-opens _Genetics in Medicine_ , and begins with the table of contents.

***

There is a deepness like being lost in the desert—but there is delirium in being lost in the desert, and not in this. There is a deepness like being struck blind, like being struck mute—like living in a phantom limb, waiting for sensation to fade around you. There is a deepness in staying very still, and not screaming.

And then you scream and scream and scream until you cough and cough and choke and cough and choke and everything hurts, everything, but the deepness is still there, sticky, empty, endless, fluid, waiting.

***

It is a nameless time on a nameless day of the week. They have read again, today, or it could still be the same day, perhaps, just, if it's late at night now—Charles does not much care, really. Erik's voice sounds like paper rubbing over dry skin so it flinches, and Erik, naturally, refuses to admit defeat but Charles insisted maybe an hour ago that he stop, and now they sit, and lie, Erik sitting in the chair, Charles immobile on his back on the bed, always, and Charles talks mostly for something to do, or mostly to vent the implacable loop of panic deep in his brain, or maybe he's already losing it again, a day or maybe two, even three with not a thought beside his own, not another open mind.

Charles says - “It scares me." - and it falls quietly in the dense space of the little room.

He says - "When you told me you’d keep me locked here, the first time, I thought I’d be angry with you forever. And I was, for months. And then, when I decided it was too hard to just keep being angry, I still thought I’d never forgive you, and I didn’t, for a long time. And now…two? days ago I woke and realised where I was and told myself I’d never give you the satisfaction of so much as speaking to you again…well. That was probably childish. Still.”

He says - “It’s not that you’re breaking me. I won’t help you. But I wonder…how long will it take before it is simply easier to pretend as though you are untarnished as my friend? And if I cannot find the energy or the persistence to care enough to be angry with you, how am I to care enough about anything? How am I to apply energy to anything at all? What does my life become when I forgive you for this?"

He says - "That scares me, my friend. Far more than the empty desert.”

And the silence holds his words close like a loving mother, like the bottom of the ocean.

  


**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I'M SORRY. I KNOW YOU ALL HATE ME NOW. But really? Erik's too smart for it to be that easy 8'D Charles is going to make it out, just not quite yet :) I promise it will be okay eventually! :'D
> 
>  **Trigger warnings extended edition** : We're not quite up to successful escape just yet. This chapter, Charles is taken back to the little house and experiences all the disappointment and anger and hopelessness associated with nearly making it then being recaptured. That's tough for me to write, but I understand that it could be very distressing for some readers. There is also some talk of blood and knife wounds.
> 
> **
> 
> And finally, having made you all hate me, the favour-asking :P
> 
> I'm currently researching the complex ways in which writers and readers talk about rape and issues of consent in non-commercial (not for money) fiction online. This includes fan fiction (all the way from drabbles to epics) as well as 'original' fiction published on sites like AO3, fictionpress or LJ.
> 
> I'm a postgrad researcher at the University of Queensland in Australia, where this project has been approved by a high level ethics committee. I am also a long time member of fandom and ficdom. I don't want to write only about my perspective, though--I'm hoping to draw on the perspectives of a whole lot of fic readers. If you're willing to help out by completing a questionnaire on your fic-reading experiences, please follow the link:
> 
> <https://www.surveymonkey.com/s/consent-in-fic>
> 
> This link wil be open for six weeks, so don't worry if you don't have time right now! It's a pretty versatile questionnaire--you can skip anything, tell me loads, or just pick multiple choice. That means you can take as much or as little time as you like. Answering every question in a short answer/multiple choice way will take roughly 15mins--but it's up to you if you'd like to spend less or more time!
> 
> Please consider adding your voice; your contribution is very much appreciated. Thank you!
> 
> For more information, feel free to contact me at jemima.cowderoy@uqconnect.edu.au


	13. Chapter 13

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Sorry for the wait (again)! Long chapter to make up for :) Thanks to those who did the questionnaire for me, you guys are awesome.

The day that the desert recedes far enough in Charles’s mind to admit claustrophobia, Erik floats the bed back out to its former home in the living room. Charles is still bed-bound, well and truly, and so the bed has to occupy an awkward space by the wall, out of reach of the sun coming in the window. Charles watches the space where the bed sat before, and has vague, sense-memory visions of burning alive, unable to move from his mattress, watching the sun come across the floor as it sinks into the afternoon then the slow arc of hours from maybe 1 to 6. By six, the sun is gone from this far flung sky, but that is time and plenty to burn. The vision is a poorly demarcated pastiche: the view is recent history, lying or sitting alone or with Erik in bed and watching the ocean; the burning alive is more recent still, burns still blistering his face and his hands and his shoulders and his neck and every other place the sun can reach; the inability to move is current, but the present is less vivid than the memory of months, braces for his back and the chair months and surgeries away. It’s a compelling medley. The bed is in shade by the wall, the sun unable to reach this far, but Charles chooses not to resist the not-quite-fever-dreams, the hot, ashy shrivelling away of the body to leave only the mind.

That night, when the air is chill and very quiet, Charles moves the bare skin of his wrists slowly, lightly, over his stomach, his chest, his really very hard indeed nipples and shivers, something like convulsively. He is aware that it’s a little weird—weirder than ever now that he has to use his wrists instead of his hands—but it does the job. It’s something to do, with nothing to do. It’s something to feel, other than his skin reknitting itself on the tops of his arms and the back of his neck and across his collarbones and all over his face. He tells himself, half convinced, that it gets his blood pumping, and thus has some merit in terms of speeding his recovery.

Charles has never been ashamed of masturbation—he can hear people’s thoughts—but it took him a little while to get the right approach to it, this past not-yet-year, post the loss of the operative part. It just sits there now, soft and lifeless, not so much as a twitch, nothing approaching a feeling—that’s gone, the necessary channels to his brain severed. It took him months, even after his doctor smiled tactfully through that conversation, to get over the irrational sense that he was betraying his masculinity by giving up on his cock. Then, even after that, when he started trying to work without it, it was just—off-putting, looking down and seeing it there, or not seeing it there, nothing making itself known through whatever shapeless jogging pants he was sheathed in that day. But one persists—Charles is twenty-nine, not eighty-nine (though he also knows from unfortunate mental experience that age is no barrier - and this thought is not helping his present cause). Charles is only twenty-nine, still a young man, and so. He was getting the hang of it, before his attempt. Now he can’t use his hands, and that makes it harder (no pun intended...but perhaps a little, bitterly).

Charles traces down between his ribs, the part of his belly where there is just still feeling, back up again, pulls and pinches one nipple against his chest with the pressure of that little bone in the side of the wrist, gasps, breathes. The thing is. He’s covered in burns. Back of his neck, collarbones, arms, face, shoulders. Erik has been taking very good care of them. The burns. Charles can’t, himself, with his hands masquerading, for now, as stumps and everything hurting—and so Erik does. Erik unwraps the wounds, cleans them, dresses them again. Erik spends hours rubbing some sort of burn cream into practically Charles’s entire body. It’s not his entire body, of course, not even close, but it feels that way, sometimes. When Charles is lying on his front, Erik straddling his back, gentle, gentle hands, matter of fact but big and powerful and spanning his back and not without pain but with more relief, and is it really Charles’s fault—it’s not—if…well.

It is unhealthy, maybe. Charles has decided he doesn’t much care. They’re not—lovers—anymore—not since Charles betrayed Erik, since Erik betrayed him right back. So what does it matter what Charles thinks about, alone at night? It’s not as though he’s forgiving Erik, not any more than—well. He’s just admitting, logically, factually, that Erik has not become any less attractive, despite his awful clothes, and that he and Erik have a history, a sexual history, and that Charles hasn’t had sex in, what, eight months? And that it’s healthy, to explore his body, his changed body, his doctor made a big deal of that. Important not to remain alienated from his body. Important to rediscover it. The new ways it works. The mysteries of cock-free orgasm.

So that’s what he’s doing. It’s practically a medical necessity.

***

The little desk calendar calls it the 23rd of June when it is not Erik but Raven who comes through the wall, via the screeching of a handheld buzzsaw.

Charles presses his wrists to his ears though it's deeply ineffective, then stings his elbows pushing himself to sit, because it’s a long time since anyone has come here who needs a screaming power tool to get through steel. No one has ever actually used one.

Someone is breaking in.

He thinks very briefly, irrationally, of Erik and then Raven, because they are the only people he has ever really had whom he could possibly associate with rescue. But Erik and Raven are the ones holding him prisoner. Then he thinks of police, or military, or maybe Moira. Moira, or even Hank, perhaps? For another mad, irrational moment, Charles thinks of his father, the way his father looked when he was alive, at least three times Charles’s tiny height and strong enough to save him from anything in the world.

When the piece of wall falls away, Raven is scowling and naked and holding a large, yellow-painted, shiny-bladed circular saw against her hip.

Charles breathes in, and out.

***

“Magneto’s busy. He disappears up here too often anyway. We lie about it.”

“So he sent you?”

“Apparently you’ve done something so you can’t feed yourself.”

The memory is automatic, and Charles tries not to smile. “I remember you feeding me once, when I was maybe twelve, and my lips, my jaw was so swollen I hadn’t eaten in…I don’t know, a while.” It’s—disorienting, seeing Raven here, after so long. “And you made me soup and held it and glared and refused to go away until I drank it through a straw.”

“And here we are twenty years later.” Raven is in the kitchen now—Charles considers trying for his chair, to wheel over and see her, but Erik isn’t wrong. Charles can’t get to the kitchen to feed himself, can't even leave the bed, he’d open everything up again, the wounds on his hands, the unfeeling one on his leg, and all of the burn blisters, the places where skin is growing back, and it would hurt, and bleed, and risk infection, and…he stays put. It is easier anyway, in a cowardly way, not to see Raven—not so much her nakedness as the difference in her—the violence in her walk, in her face. Her voice, from here in bed, is still as it has always been; as it was when she was cross, at least, when she was stubborn and not pleased with him. There is his sister in that, the sister he raised and loved and loved, fiercely, perhaps because she was the only one, perhaps simply for her vast magnificence.

He has only missed her when he is bored and desolate and lonely, and otherwise barely at all, just as he did not miss her when he and Erik first took off across the country rapt with each other like schoolboys. Perhaps that makes him an awful person; probably it makes him terrible family. He doesn’t see much point in dwelling on it. He’s had poor experience with family.

***

It is a Wednesday when it happens, and it is eerily familiar, gathering around the television, packed in even though the children are not supposed to be included in the call to come see, on and around and behind the couch just like last time, the first time, an age ago, but with everyone changed places. Sean and Alex aren’t the kids, now.

On the screen in fuzzy black and white, Lensherr is wearing maybe the world’s stupidest-looking cape and Shaw’s helmet, gesturing grandiosely as the walls of some large, nondescript building—a low level federal government administrative centre, the newsreader explains, which Hank takes to mean CIA—peel away like tissue paper in a breeze, bricks and concrete crumbling from the metal frame. There are people screaming, mostly men in suits; in the left side of the frame, one is crushed by a falling piece of tissue-paper wall. **Terrorist attack on government building** , the subtitle reads on-screen, then replaced by **‘Mutant Brotherhood’ claims responsibility** , the two lines switching back and forth. The so-called ‘Mutant Brotherhood’, the female reporter explains in a voice of studied urgency, is a terrorist organisation that appears to have sprung out of nowhere, with government officials refusing to comment. Their leader, whom observers close to the scene report calls himself ‘Magneto’, appears to be in possession of some kind of very powerful weapon that has decimated one side of the building.

The footage cuts back to the wall floating away—cuts again, to a new close up of the man being crushed.

“What the hell?” It’s not a helpful comment, maybe, but right now Hank is willing to give Sean credit for managing to say _something_. Alex actually looks shaken, which is maybe saying more. Hank can’t look at the kids. What is he possibly supposed to say to the kids?

“And now we’re coming to you live with breaking news on this story—if you look closely at our live footage behind me, coming to us completely live from where the attack is underway as we speak—if viewers look closely, you will see that there appear to be terrorists emerging from the building, and we can distinguish these people from the workers in the building because they seem to be wearing costumes of various types, very distinct from the normal workwear we can see on those victims fleeing the scene. Now there appears to be a woman—painted blue, I think, and you may want to send any children out of the room, ladies and gentlemen—there appears to be a naked woman painted blue, and another woman wearing some sort of green catsuit, and they’re bringing out a woman between them who seems to be injured, a blonde woman in a very extravagant white outfit, and I think that we have to assume that one of the terrorists has been injured, and this might be an opportunity for the national guard, who have arrived at the scene in the past ten minutes, to make an arrest—no, no wait, I’m receiving an an update now from my colleague—apparently, some of the fleeing victims have been heard shouting ‘she’s escaped’ and ‘it’s a rescue mission’ and apparently ‘they’ve come back for her’. Which would seem to suggest, viewers, that this injured woman has perhaps been under arrest—and we will be crossing shortly to the studio with Rick, who has a government spokesperson coming in to tell us more.”

“Bullshit she’s injured.”

“Alex,” Hank reprimands mostly without thinking. Several of the kids smirk at each other—and god bless the ability of children to focus on all the wrong things.

“She’s impervious to—what, everything?”

“I know.”

“What does impeveeas mean?” Declan elbows little Elliot for the question, and Sean half-heartedly bats at Deck’s arm.

“Means you can’t be injured,” Alex provides drily.

On screen, the two titles—terrorist attack, mutant brotherhood—are still switching back and forth as the carnage plays out.

“A breaking update, viewers!” The woman seems a little too pleased about the whole thing, if you ask Hank. “One of the terrorists has approached one of our cameramen, and now you won’t see this on any other station, because we’re about to cross live to one of our cameras who has a member of the ‘mutant brotherhood’ waiting to make a statement.”

Hank feels a little ill. Alex looks—thinly contained.

The camera crosses, and it’s not ‘a’ member of the ‘mutant brotherhood’, it’s five of them. Four are familiar—Lensherr with Azazel at his shoulder, Emma Frost looking very wounded and very female, hanging off of—Hank swallows bile—Raven, blue and naked and with a lot of blood on one hand. It’s not her own, by the look. The fifth is the ‘woman in a green catsuit’, chestnut-haired and slightly olive-skinned, and Sean volunteers, “she’s new, yeah?” And Alex mutters, “it’s not only children he’s been digging up.”

They knew that, of course, but—there are a lot of people on the screen. Or—there are five right now, but in the back and forth footage of the attack, the walls peeling away, mutants marching in, government workers—CIA agents, they must be, mostly—flooding out—there’ve been—thirty, maybe? It’s impossible to count, from the live broadcast, but Hank’s seen a lot of people he’s never seen before. It’s not a small group.

It’s Shaw’s right hand woman—Lensherr’s right hand woman now, Hank guesses—who speaks. Her voice is high-pitched and there’s a cut dripping blood down her face, not enough to obscure her, to disfigure her, but dramatic, and another across her chest, which is on very ample display, and what looks like mottled bruising across her collarbones. “For nearly ten months,” she—sighs? Pleads? Something high-pitched and sickly-sweet and absolutely nothing remotely like her actual demeanour as remembered by anyone—“I have been held captive in the basement of this building by cruel men who would not tell me for what I had been taken. I did nothing wrong. I was not arrested, or accused of anything—just kidnapped, and held captive here, for almost a year!” The last is a quiet exclamation, dismayed rather than furious, a vision of helplessness. Even Raven looks a bit sick at it, though maybe that’s part of the act too. “I am so thankful that these brave people have risked themselves to save me.”

Lensherr looks up then, direct to camera, and part of Hank has to wonder, just a bit, how Charles didn’t see this coming. Erik’s face doesn’t really look any different to how it always looked—angry, cold. “I have formed the Mutant Brotherhood to protect our kind against the persecution and violence of animals such as these.” He lifts a hand—and in the background, another fleeing grey suit—just making it out from the twisted remains of the building—disappears ominously beneath a disconnected piece of wall. The camera shifts a little to see—there’s a lump for half a second, and then the metal is pressed flat to the ground. Hank sort of wishes he’d sent the kids from the room when the stupid reporter suggested it. Not so much for the naked, more for the people being literally crushed to death in real time.

“Mutants will no longer tolerate being persecuted by human governments. We will not tolerate the mistreatment of mutant children by their families. We are the future of this world, and this should be a warning. We are not weak. We will not be quietly killed off. And we are coming.”

And then, impressively, even though Hank sees it coming, all five of them promptly disappear.

The image jolts as the camera man yells in a strangled sort of surprise.

For several seconds, before the coverage crosses back to 'Rick in the studio', who is just as stupid as his on-the-scene colleague, there is a mostly empty frame: twisted metal and the hole in the building and a few bodies, some moving, and inconspicuous but impossible to look away from, that perfectly flat piece of metal with what used to be a man entirely flat and invisible beneath it.

Surprisingly, or perhaps not, it’s Sean who rounds the couch and stands in front of the screen.

Hank blinks—looks across at Alex, who looks equally dazed, in his own way. The kids are all exchanging glances, elbowing each other, saying nothing—though possibly that’s Decky’s fault more than their own restraint.

Sean visibly swallows. “Okay. Um—students. This is how we _don’t_ use our powers.”

***

The second time Raven visits, she’s visibly exhausted, though perhaps only to Charles, who knows her even with the helmet pushed over her hair. It's the original one, he thinks—though perhaps it's a little different. Erik has his version, there's no reason he couldn't have made another. Charles has no idea what the thing's made of, what resources would be required.

There’s a door now—courtesy of Erik, yesterday. There was the power-tooled hole in the wall for nearly twenty-four hours before that, and when Erik arrived, the completely transparent relief on his face to find Charles still inside was almost worth the knock to Charles's pride of not trying to go through. He isn’t stupid—he doesn’t have half the energy right now that he’d need to get across the desert. If he could even have managed getting the chair through the hole with his hands as they are, because the hole was a whole foot off ground level. No obstacle to someone with legs.

The new door is likewise a foot from the ground.

Raven steps up through it, crosses to the stairs, steps up the stairs, makes some incoherent groaning sounds, and invites herself to the end of Charles’s bed.

It’s almost, almost like being home.

Charles watches her a minute before curiosity gets the better of him. “What is it?”

Raven rolls her shoulders—shivers tiny black feathers across the whole of her body—remains blue and naked. “Mngh. Just tired.”

Charles pushes himself very carefully up to sitting. It still hurts his hands a very great deal, even using the pillows. “Big day?”

“Mmhm.”

“What happened?”

Raven shoots him an amber-eyed glare. “Can’t tell you.”

Charles sort of can’t believe that that still hurts, but perhaps it’s not surprising. “Alright.”

Raven eyes him suspiciously another minute, as though this accession is a very subtle trick. Charles ignores her, and she flops back onto the bed. “You hungry?”

“A little.”

“Idiot. Have you eaten since yesterday?”

“Erik left me some sandwiches by the bed.”

“Hah. Of course.” There’s derision in it, and Charles wishes he could pretend it’s just the same slip of derision she’s always had when tired and grumpy. It’s not very different, but it’s there. “Thought you didn’t have hands,” she adds, though she’s seen the clunky way he can balance things between the bandaged lumps, if he has to.

“I appreciate you coming,” he offers, not because it’s necessarily true, but because Raven is by nature completely powerless against flattery and this is really all he is going to give her right now.

Sure enough, she’s pleased, through the pasted-on hostility. “Magneto has better things to do than make you sandwiches ‘cause you went and hurt yourself.”

Charles can think of a dozen, a score of different things that could be going on in Raven’s head. She’s trying to deal with his legs, still, he’s sure, because she’s his sister and he raised her, mostly, and she’s only seen him a few times since it happened. She’s clearly obsessed with Erik, and it’s easier for her to be hostile to Charles than to admit that Erik’s landed her brother in a wheelchair. She’s afraid of him, of Charles, maybe, because she knows, clearly, that he disagrees with her choices, and he’s always been able to talk her round, before.

Then, maybe it’s more to do with whatever has made her so tired; what has she been doing that she won’t tell him about? There are things that Erik doesn’t want him to know, of course, Charles knows this, but he has mostly managed to imagine that Raven has been spending her time wandering around some new underground base doing nothing in particular. That’s not the case, clearly—and whatever she’s been doing, that he can’t know—perhaps she feels guilt about it? Perhaps it is that that makes her hostile. Perhaps it is easier to act as though Charles’s moral compunctions are something to be derided than to admit that whatever she has done under Erik’s instruction is abhorrent.

Charles shuts down that line of thought. It is a definite possibility of course, a likelihood, even, but not a useful one. She’ll leave, if he tries to argue, he knows this because she’s always been like that. If she keeps visiting, maybe. If he gets some more time with her, time to ease into conversation, time to find his way past her walls. He’s always been able to do it without her thoughts, sort of, because he’s always been banned from her thoughts, or almost always. It’s not the same as this—as _nothing_ —but he could still do it, maybe—talk her around.

He’s burned through enough chances, though. Haste has not served him well, and he will not act hastily again. Perhaps Raven is an opportunity, and perhaps she’s not. If she keeps visiting, then perhaps he’ll find out.

***

“I don’t get it.”

Alex is pacing, which doesn’t make Hank nervous anymore, but has Sean flapping his hands abortively every time Alex turns.

“What the hell was that supposed to achieve?”

Sean shrugs. “Scare people off hurting us?”

“Oh yeah, because that always works so well.”

Hank nods reluctantly. “He knows that won’t work. He turned thirty missiles on the navy and the Russians in Cuba. He knows scaring people doesn’t work.”

“So what the hell’s he trying to pull?”

Alex probably knows the answer to that—Hank does—but it’s Sean who answers. “He’s been getting an army, right? So he’s trying to start a war.”

There’s not much to say to that. They accepted months ago—maybe from the start—that ‘Magneto’ is mad.

“Those people he killed…” Hank swallows. “The ones he killed on purpose, I mean. They were running away.” They all know this, but Hank feels like it has to at least be noted.

Alex shrugs. “Surprised?”

“Not really.”

“Do you think he’s going to come for the kids?” There’s a threat in Alex’s voice—but there’s a threat in Hank and in Sean too, for that question, because they never asked to be—responsible for these kids—to be whatever they are now—but they are, now. Most of these kids have never had in their lives anything approaching a decent human being. They’re good kids, or they’re not bad kids, and they showed up here and they trusted Hank, and Alex, and Sean. And Hank knows all three of them would do things they normally wouldn’t to protect these kids—and maybe the kids would do things they shouldn’t have to to protect each other.

He wonders, very briefly, whether they should erect some kind of sign on the front door, possibly-inspired by Erik’s stupid ‘be warned’ statement—one of the big pieces of butcher’s paper they got for the kids to draw on, something like ‘we’re not weak. You can’t take them. Turn around.’

He abandons the idea immediately, because once a postman came to the door with a package he didn’t want to leave at the gate (with good reason; Hank had been waiting on that one), and because Lensherr can rip walls away like paper, and because Raven has lived here for most of her life.

Write a sign in crayon, hide under the beds.

The late-afternoon light through the lab window is in Sean's hair, in Alex's hands. Sean looks stronger than he’s ever looked, Hank thinks, and also more childish. “He can’t have them.”

Alex smiles, just a bit. “No way.”

And if anyone can make that true, Hank thinks, it’s these two: teenagers with more sense than he’s ever had, and more strength, and maybe the only two people he’s ever been sure he’d do anything not to lose.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Comments are love, you guys are love, come chat :D
> 
> (lol also everyone's comments are epic, but zedille, your committed optimism last chapter made me grin :P)


	14. Chapter 14

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> So you all know by now that I am the slowest updater of all time :P Thanks to furius for dropping me a comment and reminding me I haven't posted a chapter in ten million years X'D <3 Edited a few chapters at once so look out for another chapter very soon!

It’s August, just, and Erik, because he is completely mad and terrifyingly true to his word, has read to Charles almost every page of every journal he brought while Charles was still unconscious and full of morphine.

He flicks through the three pages of citations on the last article in _Molecular Genetics_ , because Charles’s hands aren’t up to it yet and there’s something largely incomprehensible that Charles has to know the source of.

It’s someone in Finland, and Charles doesn’t quite make longing sounds about visiting, about poking his nose in that research. It doesn’t matter—Erik knows the longing’s there, knows Charles is holding it back, and knows it’s for Charles’s own benefit, not his. Easier not to speak it when Charles knows it won’t happen.

Charles watches Erik close the volume and tries to believe that it’s presumptuous to assume that Finland would even have him. Even if he weren’t trapped here, perhaps, this Cezary Kerntopf whom he knows nothing about might not welcome him. It’s difficult to imagine. And it would be nice to learn Finnish. He has a substantial catalogue now of languages from this part of the world, Spanishes and Brazilian Portuguese and a dozen regional languages, but he hasn’t absorbed a new European language in far too long. It was always one of his favourite parts of his power, being able to pick up languages. Kerntopf sounds Polish, and Polish he has from Erik, before the helmet, so communication wouldn’t be a problem. 

“What do you need, to do this sort of thing?”

The journal is on the table by the bed, and Erik is looking at him. Charles offers him a quizzical glance over his shoulder. “To do genetic research? A doctorate in genetics or thereabouts, for a start.”

Erik rolls his eyes, but fondly—he’s enthused. “This is good, Charles. This is what you should be doing.”

Charles’s brows rise almost comically—he pushes himself laboriously up on one elbow, enough to look at Erik properly. “Genetic research?”

“There are things here that matter. And your work, it should be displacing this. Pushing these people. You should be controlling this—knowledge.”

Erik is—smiling. At research; at the idea of Charles returning to research. As though the only thing standing in the way of that isn’t—but. Erik’s smiling. Slowly, and not without trepidation, and frighteningly desperate not to break the moment, and _needing_ to subdue his own damnable hope springs eternal optimism, Charles smiles back, and makes himself speak carefully. “This _is_ what I do, Erik. This is my way. This is how we win. This—” He props himself up a little further, up to a level with Erik. “We show people that we’re not different to them. That we’re all human. We teach people.”

“Ah, but to me, your work says the opposite. What you’ve written in _Advances in Genetics_ , and in those articles I had submitted for you, it proves that we are different. And we are, Charles. The people I’ve found—”

“Then you misunderstand me.” And this matters. “Think about what you’ve just read, Erik. The study by Jorgenson. My ability,” Charles pulls his other arm around, maintains his balance mostly by force of will, motions with two fingers briefly toward his temple, “is no different than my blue eyes.” And his eyes are wide, earnest, that terrifying mix of begging and sheer mental, emotional force and absolute conviction that has always worked so very well for Charles. “Both are mere mutations of the human genome. Nothing more, and nothing less.”

“But do people fear your blue eyes?”

Charles quirks a not-quite-sheepish grin. “When I was in school, Raven used to say she’d apply to have them listed as a controlled substance if I didn’t leave the girls alone.”

Erik raises his eyebrows in what Charles is still mostly sure, even so many months since he’s known Erik’s mind, is something like what passes for Erik for affection. Erik lies—sits—back against the pillows, and they both open their mouths at the same time, but Erik speaks over—“I never went to school.” And Charles lets his breath go. The moment is gone. “Do you understand that?”

Charles is caught out now—wrong-footed, in a way he never had to be before the damn helmet. “Of course.”

“No, Charles, you know it. I don’t believe you _can_ understand it.”

Still—“I’ve been inside your head, Erik. It doesn’t matter that you—“ he waves a non-specific gesture at the headpiece, doesn’t quite look at it. “—won’t let me now. It doesn’t change that I’ve seen you.”

“You’ve seen. You haven’t lived it.”

“Erik—“

“You have never understood what it means to be persecuted.”

“Perhaps not, but—“

“As we will be, the men and the women and the children, the moment they realise that we exist. Which is why we need to be fighting, from the moment they know us.”

Charles shuts his eyes, just a moment, opens them again with that painful self-assurance of his own rightness in all things. “We can teach them otherwise. It doesn’t have to be that way.”

“And yet it is that way.” Erik is sitting up now, every muscle in his body no longer in repose, and the envy in Charles is sharp at that, at the ease of that. Erik’s voice is hard. “I deal in reality, Charles.”

“No. You deal in fear.”

“Really?”

“You deal in fear, Erik. Just like them.”

Erik is halfway to standing, but he stops. “How dare you?”

That makes Charles draw back, infinitesimally; makes his eyes narrow. “How dare I? I dare much, my friend.”

There is a suspended moment of hovering violence—then “Always,” Erik—agrees? Dismissive, and “yes,” derisive, and then Erik is standing, and the moment of hot fury is gone, and what’s left is worse.

“I dare because you are losing anything that makes you different to them. You’re afraid, and you want to lash out, and strike down what you’re afraid of.”

“I will not let our people be trampled down and stamped out by cockroaches.”

“And they will not let their people be trampled down and stamped out by terrifying superpowered mutants, and where does that leave us?”

“You have never known how to pick a side, Charles.” Heading for the door, or the wall, it’s all the same, and Charles _can’t move_ and it’s _so frustrating_

and he twists himself round on the bed, hard enough to make his shoulder pull and ache but he can grasp the bedhead now, more with his wrist than his hand, but still, and pull himself up, a parody of kneeling so that he can see Erik’s back, can face him and _try_ —“There don’t have to _be_ sides!”

But the wall separates from itself, stupid Erik with his stupid gestures and clearly the door is too human for him, and—

“Erik.”

—clunks heavily back into place; not a seamless slide, because Erik is angry, and Charles doesn’t need the thoughts inside that headpiece to know him striding back out into the desert, mouth set, eyes cold.

Charles sinks back down onto his knees, sort of, or sinks back down until his body holds itself up, at least, and he’s awkwardly balanced on top of the pile of what are theoretically limbs. He rolls his right shoulder backward, forward, backward again; massages it hard with the heel of his other hand, the little bit that mostly avoided being torn to pieces.

It still aches.

***

Raven visits again the day after that, opening the door with one hand, the other balancing a stack of foil packages presumably full of food, because Charles isn’t entirely sure anyone would come at all anymore if he could feed himself.

She scowls and refuses to talk to him if he calls her Raven, but he does it at least once each time she visits anyway.

“I can’t stay,” she says this time, and doesn’t really sound sorry. She only ever really sounds angry, now, or angry and tired, or angry and tired and suspicious. So much for Erik taking good care of her. “I wouldn’t be here at all but Magneto won’t have anyone else near you. So here’s food, don’t do anything stupid, try not to accidentally die.”

It’s the first day since he woke up back in his bedroom—when did it become his bedroom?—that someone hasn’t sat on the edge of his bed and fed him at least one meal. It would be nice to think that it means his hands are healing, but neither Raven nor Erik has unwrapped his hands since three days ago. What it actually means is that they’re both busy, and what that means is almost certainly something that Raven ‘can’t tell’ him, or that Erik would redirect the conversation away from. It makes it hard to think about stomaching whatever’s in the foil, but he’ll eat later, when he’s too hungry to have no appetite. Not eating stopped being perversely satisfying months and months and months ago.

Raven steps back out the door with a one-handed wave over her shoulder, and Charles sinks back into the cushions, and watches the ocean, and continues to resist the urge to occupy the minds of the whole tour bus when it reaches the beach and bring them here to get him and forget what Erik would do to them to punish him; continues to resist the urge to make the bloody tour guide feel horribly, inexplicably guilty for doing as he was instructed and well-paid to.

***

It’s Elliot who knocks on the door to the study, Charles’s study, where Alex and Sean have taken to spending a lot of time and Hank is presently on a break from his lab work. Alex has had a chat with his little group, the three he trains at the back of the orchard—Hank knows he spoke to them the day of the broadcast, though it wasn’t really spoken about. Maybe those three spoke to the other children and maybe they didn’t, but Elliot is the youngest, and the least hurt, and it shouldn’t really be surprising that he makes his way to knocking on the door, when Hank has so utterly failed to come up with an angle to bring to the kids at large.

“Mmmmmmmhm?” Sean answers.

The door squeaks a little, because no one’s tended to anything so mundane as hinges since Erik was here.

“Deck and Milton say I shouldn’t ask,” the child begins when the door is fully open, little jaw set and hands fidgeting by his sides. “But you said to ask you things. Beast did.”

Hank doesn’t even flinch at the name anymore. He knows what’s coming, or has some idea, but he asks anyway. “What do you want to know?” Alex shoots him a dirty look because apparently (to quote yesterday in the same chairs) he talks to the children like they’re university students. Alex is definitely exaggerating. Regardless, high expectations are good for children.

“Were the people Magneto squashed bad guys?”

It’s probably, Hank thinks, the hardest question the kid could have asked. He’s been thinking about answers to these questions, the last day and a half, and he thinks he could do most of them. But…were the men trying to run away ‘bad’? They were agents, almost certainly, so yeah, they’d be bad if they were on the doorstep. But that’s not an answer he can give. How do you tell a five-year-old that yeah, maybe, but that doesn’t make it okay? How do you explain to a five-year-old the difference between protecting yourself and murder?

“Magneto didn’t know if they were bad.” Alex sounds completely, flawlessly confident. “They might have been, but he shouldn’t have hurt them when they were trying to run away.”

“Then why did he?”

Alex holds the kid’s gaze like he’s not five, and Hank is deeply, deeply envious of his composure, but also making a mental note to tell him later that he’s a massive hypocrite. “‘Cause he’s really mad at people, and sometimes people who are really mad do bad things.”

Elliot thinks about that, visible in the way of children—a little crease in his brow, his nose slightly wrinkled. “Like when Ari knocked over the tree ‘cause she was cross at you?”

Alex looks caught out for a moment—clearly that was one story he hadn’t expected to be passed around—but he recovers quickly. He’s so, so good with them, with all the kids. “A bit like that. But much worse. Do you know why?”

Elliot nods enthusiastically. “‘Cause hurting people is more bad than hurting trees.”

“Mmhm,” Sean grins, more at Alex than at Elliot.

Alex nods. “So you guys can’t ever do that, yeah? Do bad things ‘cause you’re mad.”

More nodding.

“Even though you’re probably going to see Magneto doing it on TV some more.”

That puts the frown firmly back in place, but the kid still nods.

“Is that all?”

Elliot starts nodding but then stops, one foot already back out the door.

Hank glances at Alex before cutting in. “What is it, Elliot?”

Elliot bites his bottom lip—looks at each of them, then back over his shoulder, then back at Alex. “Deck and Milton and Ari say people are going to think we all—do bad things now. Like when we’re mad. Or like—squashing people. They said my mum will think I squash people.”

Bloody Declan.

But of course—he’s not wrong.

Hank stands up, because he can’t not, then kneels, then sits on the rug, because even then he still towers over the tiny child. “Your mum loves you. She’ll know you’re a good boy.”

Elliot nods a few times, still biting his lip. He’s not convinced.

Hank holds out one massive, blue hand. He leaves it there until Elliot reaches one out too—flails awkwardly for a minute—then sort of pokes Hank in the palm. Hank has to smile. “I look a bit scary, yeah?”

Elliot gives a very suspect look out of the side of his eye to the others. “Maybe.”

Alex laughs.

Hank smiles again. “But you know I’m not really, yeah?”

That’s an easier one, apparently, because the nodding’s back.

Hank nods too. “And it’s the same. Your mum might see some people on tv with powers doing bad things and think that people with powers look scary. But she knows that you’re not like that, yeah?”

Slowly, the kid nods again—maybe not totally convinced, but getting there. “Maybe we could go on tv too?”

Hank blinks. “Er—“

“We don’t do things like that, Elliot.” There’s no hesitation in Alex.

Elliot looks mortified. “I know that! I mean—like, we could go on tv and do nice things. Like…like rescue people’s pets from trees and roofs. I could be good at that. And like you could…unblock tunnels, maybe? And you could keep airplanes in the air by yelling. And you could stop cars hitting people! ‘Cause you’re more big than a car. And then people would know that we do nice things!”

Hank really wants to look to the others for some sort of answer to that, but he can’t quite bring himself to look away from the kid.

Alex coughs.

“That would be really good.” Sean’s voice is careful and kind, like when he tries to teach them to read, even though he’s awful at it. “That’s a really good idea, Elliot.”

“But we have to be careful,” Alex interrupts. Hank catches the tail-end of Sean’s glare when he looks back at them.

“We have to be careful,” Sean repeats. “Right now, there are some people who don’t like us much. Even though we haven’t done anything bad. Because they’re confused about us.”

“Because other people with powers did bad things,” Elliot agrees (and oh god, is there no hope for them to protect even this youngest one from anything?)

“Yep. So right now, we need to stay pretty quiet. Like, if we saved some cats on tv, people who don’t like us might come try to—well, we don’t want that.”

Elliot is pouting. “Even if we helped do good things?”

Hank nods, and it’s not hard to be serious. “People can be quick to—not like—and—not very quick to like again.” He can almost feel Alex rolling his eyes.

“But it’s a really good idea,” Sean repeats. “And I mean—well, we’ll talk about it. Like maybe it could be a good thing to do some time. Thanks for telling us.”

“I could definitely get cats out of trees,” Elliot confirms. “And maybe catch birds. Or get balls and stuff off of roofs. I’d be good at that too.”

The image of tiny Elliot, floating up to the tops of trees and roofs and not even remotely expecting the people around him to react badly, is simultaneously deeply horrifying and terribly sweet.

“We’ll keep that in mind,” Sean answers, which is absurd but does the job, for a five-year-old.

“You’re always welcome to ask us this sort of thing,” Hank confirms, for good measure. There’s another awkward silence. “Was there something else, Eliot?”

The kid shuffles his feet—glances over his shoulder again. Are the other kids listening, or is Elliot just used to them being there? His voice is very small. “Does it mean Magneto’s not our friend anymore? And Mystique? And the others?”

And it’s so easy to forget that it was Raven, for the most part, who came and took these children away from their old lives and smiled at them and enchanted them with her skin and then sent them here.

Hank thinks about Raven on the television, fuzzy and grey and with blood not her own all over one hand, walking untroubled through Lensherr’s carnage, over the bodies of men trying to flee. “Sometimes,” he starts, and if his voice is a little thick, he’s a twelve-hundred pound giant blue beast, and no one’s going to know the difference. “Sometimes we really want to be friends with someone, but we can’t.”

“I liked Mystique,” Elliot not-quite-argues.

Hank swallows for the too-manyth time. “So did I.”

“Sometimes people change.” And maybe Alex, for all no one would have called it, is the only one of them who’s really cut out for this. “And that doesn’t mean we don’t want to be friends with them anymore, but sometimes it means we can’t, until they stop doing bad things.”

It’s so simple to say, Hank thinks. So many things are so simple to say.

***

“You don’t have to lose your life,” Erik says the next day, behind the kitchen bench, cutting fruit with a knife that isn’t in either hand, pouring water into two glasses.

Charles doesn’t dignify that with a response.

“Before all this, before you let the CIA entangle you in their rubbish, you researched genetics. You can’t teach now, I understand that, but you can research. I’m told that most academics would be very grateful for the opportunity to research without students getting in the way.”

That’s interesting. “Who have you spoken to?” Are they still alive? Is it cowardly not to ask?

“I made some visits. I can set you up here for research. I’ll need you to give me clear instructions for what you need in terms of biological matter, and any specific equipment, but I’ll have what I am told is a basic lab setup here for you in the next fortnight.”

It is, Charles decides. Cowardly. “Whatever academic you’ve ‘visited’, Erik. What have you done to him? Or her, I suppose.”

Erik looks mildly exasperated. “I don’t spend my time trying to alienate you.”

“You almost killed my doctor. And you kept him captive for months.”

“While he treated you. And Dr. Calker, against my better judgement, remains alive. You need not be worried, Charles.”

Untrue, of course, but Charles decides, after a moment, that nothing is likely to be gained right now by pushing. Besides—well. “You’re building me a genetics lab?”

“If you want one.”

Charles doesn’t agree with that, not right away, because this isn’t a faceless motel by a highway, the places where they learned each other, and it isn’t home, even if it is home now. If Erik thinks he can twist Charles’s work to whatever cause he’s trying to advance when he’s not here… “Why?”

Erik is crossing the room now, a glass in each hand, the fruit still on the kitchen bench because they don’t have metal plates. He raises an eyebrow.

“You know I won’t help you. Why, then, are you building me a genetics lab?”

Erik places the glasses on the table by the bed, and turns around and heads back to the kitchen. “Because your work is important. And because I love you.”

It’s so simple to say, Charles thinks. So many things are so simple to say.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thanks for sticking with this story, guys :) It means a lot that you keep coming back. The next four chapters are all big plot explosions (not _that_ one quite yet lol :P), look for the first of them in a few days!


	15. Chapter 15

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> So this chapter...THINGS HAPPEN IN THE PLOT. 'What?' you say, 'That doesn't happen in this story' XD But after months of sitting around in Peru/Westchester, we have returned to plot progression :P This is not to say that Charles gets out, 'cause when that finally happens I'm not going to mention it and you're all going to think it's another red herring :P
> 
> Thanks always always always to azryal, victoriangirl, sakurazukalori, zedille and Kernezelda for coming back to the party! And thanks and welcome to people I don't thiiiiiink I've seen before, lovegreedyme and candy4tartarus! <3

It’s the final weeks of summer, and it’s late afternoon. The sun is low enough not to swelter so badly as midday, burning like a spreading sore across the horizon, but the earth is soaked with the heat of earlier and Alex is going to blast down one of the trees and build a shopping cart, Hank be damned.

Maybe he should just find out how Hank orders all his what-even-is-that materials and add some wood on the quiet.

Maybe he should try to teach Ari and Will to collaboratively beat things into shape out of metal or something. Beat teaching them to knock things over and spending most of the time boring into their heads not to do it to people.

Maybe he should buy Hank an oversized balaclava and some big gloves and tell him to do the shopping for once.

Sean is looking substantially less murderous. “Do you think I’d freak people out?”

Alex takes a second to refocus. It’s hard to shake the image of big blue Beast-Hank in a balaclava. “You freak me out.”

Sean makes a face. “Yeah really smart. I mean it. Do you think my screaming would freak people?”

It sounds like Sean has put a disconcerting amount of thought into this.

Alex shrugs. “I think the flying would probably freak them more. People ignore normal crazy dudes.”

“Yeah, but—okay, don’t bite my head off. But you know, the other night, Elliot was right, people’d probably like him if he saved kittens from trees, or got stuff of roofs or whatever. But I don’t know if I did it—I think the screaming might freak people out, you know?”

Alex doesn’t stop walking, because the roadside is radiating a steady attempt to slowly cook him. He does actually look at Sean, though. “If Elliot saved kittens from trees, the CIA would put him in a lab and treat him like a monkey.”

Sean’s mouth twists, but Sean always argues. “Okay yeah, but other people, normal people—“

“His own mom was so freaked she just handed him over to Raven.”

Sean opens his mouth.

“Raven’s blue, Sean.”

Sean sighs. “I just think…I mean, it’s not like his mom threw him out with the trash. And I mean, mine didn’t know, and she wasn’t exactly world’s greatest mom material, but—I dunno, I don’t think she’d have been so freaked. And okay, so maybe not kittens, but—like, what if I saved someone from falling out of a plane? Or—or saved a kid from falling off a roof? Something like that. You know? I mean, then, maybe…”

It isn’t that Alex hasn’t thought about it. If anything, Sean would probably freak people out the least of any of them. When Elliot flies, he looks like a tiny god. When Sean flies, he looks like a run of the mill mad scientist. Given that his flight is mostly the work of Hank and Xavier, that estimation probably isn’t far off. But even then, with his power not looking all that obviously like a power…the screaming would be annoying enough that no one would make a fuss when the CIA made him disappear.

Alex himself is an obvious no. He’s been locked up more than once already. He’s spent more than half his life locked up. It would never matter whether he could find something productive to do. And god knows he’s tried hard enough to think of something. He’d still be the guy who fires lasers from his body. He’d still be a walking weapon. That is never going to be people-friendly. That is never going to get him anything but another cage. His three littlies would be the same. Then there’s Hank and Milton, who at best might just be seen as freaks, things to be poked and prodded; at worst, someone'd call them a threat to the humanity of humanity and that'd be the end of them.

“What could you do?”

“Huh?”

“Elliot and I can get stuff from high places. Hank could lift cars off people and stuff. I dunno, what would you do?”

“Stay hidden.”

“Havooooook….”

“Don’t call me that.”

“Then think of something, man.”

Alex shrugs stiffly. “I’ve tried. I’m a human laser, retard. I break shit.”

“Well, you could break rocks I guess. But that’s sort of boring.” A pause. “You could dig tunnels? You could be ‘Smashman’.”

“Great.”

“Oh, I know! You could break into buildings!”

Alex levels him a very flat stare. “That’s going to win me loads of favour, dickhead.”

“No.” Sean rolls his eyes like it’s an art form. “I mean, like, collapsed buildings. Or locked buildings with kids trapped in them. Or cult fortresses, where they’re sacrificing babies. Or schools that are snowed in.”

“There is something wrong with your brain.”

“Okay, okay, bad list. But pretty good idea.” He’s grinning like Alex is going to suddenly cave and start sharing his enthusiasm.

“I don’t think people need to be laser-blasted out of snow days.”

An entirely unconcerned shrug. “Maybe.”

“Sean, if I went around blasting things, I’d be locked up. In a second. And then they’d track the rest of you down, and the kids would be fucked. Believe me. I’ve been there. Just leave it. Seriously.”

Sean bites his lip—licks it—looks at Alex, then the road, then Alex again before deciding to bite the bear. “You were locked up ‘cause you killed someone, though.”

“Oh fucking hell—"

“Wait, just wait, I’m not saying—I know it was an accident. Like really an accident. Like you were a kid and you weren’t meaning to hurt anyone and all that. But I’m just saying—I mean, you weren’t locked up because of your power, you were locked up because you killed someone.”

“Thanks for the heads up.”

“Hey, man, just—I’m just saying, that might not happen to the kids. I mean, sure, if they messed up. But I don’t think people would come for Elliot’s blood if he saved a kitten.”

“Holy shit, Sean, it’s not happening.”

The trees come into sight—familiar, now, recognisable even from the wrong side—then the house, and then finally the gates. They swing open before Alex and Sean are within five yards—“I saw you coming over the wall!” “What does that mean about people seeing _you_ over the wall, Elliot?” “…it was just for a bit!”—and then there are kids taking shopping bags, and Ari and Aly poking Alex in the leg with a question, and Hank sticking his head out the window to welcome them back, and by the way…

Alex pleads an unspecified but crippling oncoming illness when they start to put the kids to bed, and he’s in bed alone before any unwanted conversations have another chance to surface.

***

In the end, Sean thinks, it is a lot like fate, though he’s pretty sure Alex and Hank would both think that was stupid.

The column of smoke rises toward the sun in the direction of town at two in the afternoon. You always imagine that sort of thing to happen at night, but this is clear daylight, and something much bigger than a campfire. It’s Sean who thinks to ask Jill, probably because Sean spends three or four times more hours with most of the kids every day than the others do, but also because Sean is pretty awesome.

The town is not a stretch for Jill’s hearing, hasn’t been in months now, but separating out the sounds of the town, focusing on any one at a time, has remained a sticking point. Luckily, at this particular moment most of the town is doing the same thing they are—trying to find out about the giant column of smoke.

A high-pitched squeak “There’s people stuck!” is the first coherent phrase to emerge from the low, babbling murmur that tends to accompany Jill’s attempts to focus.

“There’s people stuck in a fire?”

Hank leans down to Alex’s ear. “Should we be making Jill listen to this?”

Alex shrugs.

If Sean has thought of this, it doesn’t concern him. “Can you hear anything else?”

Jill is shivering a little, but Hank is pretty sure it’s exertion, not horrible inerasable trauma. Her voice is fairly even now, for a very little person. “Lots about ladders. And the roof fell in. And some people talking about stupid Madge leaving the oven on. And someone yelling that’s not what happened. And some more about ladders.”

“Madge is the butcher’s wife,” Alex mumurs, for Hank’s ears only. “They’ve got two kids. Boy and a girl. We see her with the little girl at the store sometimes.”

Hank glances around at the kids then back to Alex. “There are three ladders in the shed. Do you think you could get there in time?”

“There’s a volunteer fire brigade. They should have ladders.”

“They do have ladders.” Jill.

This, of course, is the peril of a child with superhuman hearing.

“They can’t get off the ladder ‘cause the roof fell down on the top floor.”

Hank curses under his breath before he remembers that Jill can hear him. “I have a hack saw. And a handheld circle saw. That might help cut in? Might take too long, though—"

It's the absurdity that does it, Alex thinks in hindsight—the overwhelming redundancy in the spontaneous image of himself trying to cut through a wall and a roof with a circle saw while the kids choke on smoke on the other side.

“I don’t need a hack saw.” It’s maybe the single most impulsive decision Alex has ever made. “I’m taking the car.”

***

Sean chases him out the door. Some of the kids are shouting inside, but it’s sort of distant. Sean catches up with him as he throws the garage door open.

“Fuck a driver’s license, Sean. Hank’ll get over it. We know these kids. We’ve met them. If I can help get them out—"

“I’m coming with you.”

Alex pauses half a second, half way into the driver’s seat.

Then Sean is throwing himself in the other side, and there isn’t time for talk.

***

“I thought you said you weren’t going to go blasting things?”

Alex is driving very fast.

“Hank’s suits are practically a disguise. And I grabbed a sweater. I’ll tie it round my head. No one’ll know who I am.”

“Huh.”

“Marion tried to give me a cinnamon bear two weeks ago. She’s five. She doesn’t deserve to die.”

“Yep.”

“This is something I can do. There’s not fucking much I can do with this, but this? I can do this. I can blast shit out of the way.”

“Yeah.”

“How long’s since we saw the smoke?”

Sean shrugged. “Three minutes? Four?”

“Ladders mean second storey. If the fire’s on the first, they should still be fine.”

Alex swings around the second of four corners between the estate and town without any application of the brake.

Sean swears loudly and clings to the door. “Holy crap man. Don’t kill us before we get there.”

Alex ignores him.

Sean waits for the long stretch of straight road, then starts tearing the sweater in half. They both have faces to cover, if Alex is going to get up to the second storey.

***

There’s a house burning down with three people trapped inside, two of them children. The town’s focus is not on the road, who’s on it or what they’re wearing. A few heads turn when the car wheels into the street and screeches to a halt, but they’ve never driven to town before, and god knows when the car was last used by Charles. No one recognises it.

When they exit the car at a run, peering hopelessly through ripped sweater but mostly going toward firelight and the thickest crowd, a few people turn, point, shout at the two young men running and shoving toward the fire in yellow and blue bodysuits with faces covered, but there’s a house burning down. Most don’t even fight being shoved out of the way.

When they break through the crowd, the man from the grocery, manning the pathetic little water truck, yells—“get back! Oy! Firemen only! We don’t need more people getting—“—and he moves to get in their way, and there’s another volunteer at the base of the ladders, and two more with hoses, and someone at the top of each ladder trying to wrestle with maybe half of the roof—and Sean grabs Alex from behind as he yells— “lucky you got me!” and Alex doesn’t have time to argue for fighting for the ladder because they’re off the ground, because Sean is screaming, and Sean is hovering, loudly, and it’s too loud to yell the firemen out of the way but people are pointing now, and the fire looks everywhere, and Alex shuts it out, Sean’s voice, screaming, and Sean’s arms tight under his own, hands wrapped around his forearms, arms shaking under his bent elbows—blocks it out, Sean, and the people below, and the smoke, and focuses on a corner of the house, the furthest corner from the two ladders, and lets it all go.

Sean’s not the only one screaming now, but one of the firemen atop the ladder turns around, turns back, points, starts motioning toward the new, smoking hole.

Alex holds his arms stiff in Sean’s grip, focuses a little to the left, and blasts again.

The fireman, thank whatever stupid cruel god is watching them all, stops gesturing like he’ll climb in through the corner and starts just getting the fuck out of the way. The other follows suit before Alex is finished with a third blast.

And then they’re gone, and there are three people on the inside who could be right on the other side of the blockage but Alex has to, has to have faith that Madge has the good sense after three massive explosions in the corner of her house to be staying back, because if she doesn’t, they’re all going to die by smoke or fire anyway.

Sean squeezes his forearms, and Alex looks at the tops of the ladders, at the wall-roof-mess just above there, and thinks briefly, hysterically, of the two mad scientists standing either side of a mannequin with an ‘X’, and lets go.

***

The firemen have new ladders leaned against the wall before Sean can get himself stabilised, before Alex can blink back the panic of what-if-that-just-killed-them enough to start making hopeless incoherent gestures with his head toward the house.

Sean has him in the hole before the men are halfway up the new ladders.

“Go.” His voice sounds muffled through the sweater—through the silence after Sean screaming—through the screaming still below.

“What?”

“Sean, go! Get out of here!”

“What?”

“I’m getting them out. Go! Wait for me ‘round the corner with the car.”

“Dude—"

“Go!”

There’s silence behind him as he runs into the smoke for one, two, three seconds—then there’s Sean, screaming, flying, and Alex starts shouting too. “Madge! Marion!”

The roof is still collapsing—the cracks of it are louder than his voice.

He blasts another piece out of the way and prays in the split second as it disintegrates that it’s not hiding a supporting column. It’s not.

“Hey! Come on! Madge! Anyone!”

Another doorway, dangerously close to collapse, stinging and stringing with flames.

“Where are you!”

He hears the coughing before the shouting, weirdly enough—or maybe not. It’s easier to cough, with lungs full of smoke.

Down the hall, around the corner—

“Hello? Hello! We’re in here!”

The doorway has collapsed—the roof and an internal wall have followed. The coughing’s still behind it.

“Get out of the way!”

“What?” Madge, and more coughing—one of the kids.

“I’m blowing this out of the way! Get back!”

Alex centres himself—forgets the heat that is still very real through the suit, forgets the coughing, forgets Sean outside—Alex centres himself, and pools it, whatever it is—and he can’t do this, can’t do small blasts, hasn’t entirely gotten the hang of it yet, but they’ll get out of the way, and he’ll try. He has to try. He has to try, at least once.

“Okay! Quick! The floor’s—"

Alex doesn’t wait to hear it.

It’s as easy as breathing—it’s a part of him. Always has been.

And then the fallen wall, and roof, and doorframe are gone, and they’re running toward him, two tiny children and their mother, flames licking through the floorboards.

“Come on! Quick.” A child under each arm—he’s always been strong. Prison will do that for you.

Another piece of fallen roof is easy—aim high, better to blast more roof than to take out the floor—the chimney collapses as they’re almost beneath it but that’s easy too, easy to blast it into dust midair.

And then there’s the sky, and screaming, more than just the children, more than just Madge who buys sweets for her little girl and smiles at Sean's chattering, and there’s two men in thick, shiny fire coats, and it’s the hardest part, perhaps—the hardest part, to let the children go, and know they’re safe now.

Alex stands on the edge of the second storey, on the edge of his charred hole for five seconds, ten—while the two men take up the children, start down the ladders—while their mother follows, shaky legged but hurrying anyway, her children already almost at the ground.

The whole town’s below. Someone will catch her if she falls.

Alex climbs halfway down before he jumps. He can hear the yelling behind him—not just screaming now, there are words—

But then he’s around the corner, and he’s running, and he’s running, and he’s running until the car is there and Sean’s there and it’s all he can do with a throat full of smoke to yell “Drive! Drive, Sean!”

And the yelling, and the screaming, and the sounds of the house collapsing fade behind them.

***

Four corners away and several long stretches of straight, Hank is half a foot from pressing his face to the gate bars. He has to move to let the car back on the estate, and even then Sean has to stop it barely inside the cover of the high walls because the other option is running Hank over.

Sean’s not actually sure that would damage Hank more than it would the car.

Hank has the passenger door open before Sean can open the driver’s, and he’s pulling at the sweater still tied round Alex’s head with his massive hands and Alex is batting him away not very gently and Sean reaches across and manages to land a hand on each of them and says “It’s fine!” loudly. “It’s fine. We’re fine. Hank. We’re good.” A laugh, not half hysterical. “We’re good, man.”

“Sean?”

Sean wrestles his own piece of sweater down to hang around his neck. “Yeah man.”

Hank is breathing heavily. “You look the same with—what is that?”

Alex is still fighting his. “Sweater.”

Sean tugs it down like his own before Alex can argue.

Alex is a mess. His ‘sweater’ is singed, and there’s soot on his face where they ripped the hole to see through, and his suit is blackened and covered in bits of splintered wood and not torn through anywhere, but on the way to ripping in at least three places.

“What did you do?”

Hank looks somewhere between awestruck and horrified. Mostly, actually, he just looks scared.

Sean has his mouth open to answer when Alex laughs, “I saved them. Madge and Marion and the other kid, whatshisname. I saved them.”

Hank stares.

Sean stares too, for a moment—because Alex’s eyes are wild, and also ringed in soot, but he’s grinning—laughing, sporadically, breathlessly—and he’s right.

Hank murmurs, “Do we need to move? Do we need to get the kids out? I’ve got the jet—"

“No one saw us,” Sean interrupts before Hank can kill the moment any further. “I mean, they saw us, but no one recognised us. And Alex ran away and met me in the car so we weren’t followed.”

“You’re sure?”

“I’m sure.” Alex meets Hank’s eyes with absolute certainty.

There’s a moment—where they’re all afraid, and breathless, because they are all afraid all the time now, and breathless too.

And then Hank smiles slowly, and Alex breathes out, and gasps in another breath—and bloody hell he’d better not have breathed too much smoke, he had the sweater over his mouth, he should be fine—and then Hank says “Nice.” And Alex barks another laugh. And Sean laughs too, and claps Alex on the thigh once, twice, and then they’re all laughing, and laughing, and laughing, and that’s still what they’re doing when the kids send Decky and Will as emissaries out from the house to see what’s going on: laughing.

They’ve lost people. More than half, if you count by who was there the day they met in a dumb room in a CIA compound. And their great world-saving expedition went to shit, and several countries want them dead, and they’re all under twenty-five and they have eight kids.

But they’re fine. They’re together. And today, they did something good.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Let me know what you think!


	16. Chapter 16

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> As per usual, thanks to the lovely people who reminded me that I should update this - new people, this time! So thanks vspirit for your comment this week, and thanks also to alla spiattellata who commented back in February and may well have roused me then had I not been fresh off 48 hours of airplane X'D And thanks always, of course, to the standing crew who've been here since almost the beginning and are here still - azryal, zedille, Cathliz, avictoriangirl, furius - and to the fabulous people who've been so patient with me since!
> 
> Last chapter was all the boys - this chapter is all the Charles. Parts of it may flow better if you rescan chapters 13-15 but you guys know me, everything's been rolling round for a while :P I'm going to be honest, they both make me laugh this chapter :P That said...
> 
> WARNING: there is some potentially triggery stuff toward the end; skip down to the endnote for details.

It’s a watershed moment, in hindsight—it’s the first step, the pebble that eventually becomes the landslide that by some combination of chance and patience breaks down the door.

At the time, it’s a better day than most.

“You’d be proud,” Erik—grouches, there’s really no other word for it—as he steps through the door, halfway through August.

“Oh?” Charles doesn’t get his hopes up—doesn’t even think to. If anything had actually happened, Erik would be—different.

“Alex blasted his way into a burning house and pulled out most of a family.”

That…is not anything he was expecting. That is almost something actually happening, really. Charles doesn’t let it show. “Is he alright?”

Erik shrugs, dumps a shopping bag in the kitchen—Charles wonders, absurdly, for a moment, whether Erik actually goes shopping, and whether he wears his ridiculous outfit if he does—then comes back to perch in Charles’s weeks-unused wheelchair, eyes out over the ocean. “He’s fine. He was wearing something like what Hank designed for us before Cuba. The fire didn’t seem to touch him. I suspect that Sean was there too, since Alex seems to have gone in via the second floor. Camera only captured Alex, though. Amateur photographs of his back. No one will recognise him.”

Charles watches the back of Erik’s neck. Erik isn’t angry about this—he’s not sure what to think, perhaps. Erik is a good man, but he’s controlled so utterly now by his anger, and by his fear more than that.

“Are the people alright? Whom he saved?”

“Probably. I’ve only seen the pictures. He’s improved his control.”

Charles nods, because he could say how wonderful it is that Alex has found a positive way to use his power, but he’s not sure he wants to take Erik down the road of ways for Alex to use his power. “So why are the boys allowed to roam free, and I’m stuck here?”

Erik looks deeply skeptical about the veracity of the question. “They didn’t hijack Azazel’s mind and send four score of war criminals safely home to their families.”

“You don’t think they would have done the same given the chance?”

“They weren’t given the chance.”

“So I should have cut and run in Cuba and left with them instead of you.”

Erik breathes out through his nose, and stands. He may possibly be praying for patience, so far as Erik ‘prays’. He heads past the bed, over to the bookshelf, where a metal tub seems to have deposited itself at some point since he opened the door. “You’re infinitely more powerful than they are, Charles.”

“Really? With your head shield, I shouldn’t think so.”

“I should.”

“Hank’s a genius.”

“As are you. And you’re also a telepath.”

“Hank’s got to be a good five times your weight in muscle mass.”

“Which doesn’t help him much if I lob a truck at him.”

Charles’s frown deepens from mostly rhetorical to partly worried.

Erik doesn’t really sigh. The tub is full of journals and what looks like a couple of books, now being piled on the shelves by Erik in no order that Charles can discern. “Which I have no reason to do, because as I’ve told you, I’m looking after the boys. Stop worrying.”

“It’s what you mean by ‘looking after’ that worries me.”

“Leaving them alone to spend your money and occasionally sending them small children to care for.”

Charles frowns—it’s back to thinking, though. “How did they get my money?”

“I’m very clever.”

“I gave Hank my accounts, didn’t I?”

“I’ve ensured they can’t be traced.” Erik glances over at the bed. “I can stop them spending all your money, if you want.”

Charles shakes his head almost absently—the thought hadn’t occurred to him. “No, no—no, I’m glad. It’s good. Good.” A thick roll of the shoulders, though it never really helps. Not even wheelchair cramps, now—just awkward movement and stillness, sitting in bed for weeks, pushing himself up to sit and down to lie using odd parts of his hands and arms because all the sensible, low-strain parts are still raw and painful.

Erik finishes shelving the new stack of journals.

Charles tries, honestly, to imagine Alex and Sean and Hank taking care of a whole flock like little Milton the chameleon, but can’t quite manage. “They are remembering to feed the small children, yes? You’ve checked?”

It’s a serious question, because Charles can’t help himself, but it’s the first thing in weeks to make Erik laugh. “Yes, Charles. I’ve checked.”

There are other things to say, to ask, but Erik leans back against the bookshelf, and Charles watches him laugh.

***

Raven comes again, a—fourth time?—yes, because there was the surprising first, then the second she was tired and cross, the third she only stayed a minute.

Now it’s the fourth time she’s come—the things by which one counts one’s days, or weeks, when nothing else changes—and it is the last Tuesday of August, almost the last day of August, and Raven is wheeling a sort of cart with a large box in it. She doesn’t answer Charles’s greeting when she comes through the door, nor does she come in—she stays at the door for nearly a full minute, making disgruntled noises as she wrestles the box and then the cart through the not-at-floor-level, wheelchair-proof door.

Charles smiles the question at the box as she lugs it up the few stairs.

Raven scowls. “You’re getting a lab.”

Charles blinks at that. It’s not news, but—it’s exciting, in a way he wouldn’t have expected, that there might be things in the box that could let him work again. God but he’s missed _doing_ something.

“Of course,” Raven goes on, bitingly sardonic, “If you didn’t keep trying to get yourself and the rest of us killed, you could just use one of the labs we already _have_.”

And those are Erik’s words, have to be. Part of Charles is deeply indignant—how dare Erik turn his sister against him? but a bigger part is so unsurprised that it’s mostly just sort of pathetically sweet, the way she worships every word Erik says. If Erik knew half the effect he can have on people…perhaps he does, now.

“I think some technician is going to come set things up. This is just some stuff.” The ‘stuff’ goes on the dining table. Charles wonders whether later it might be worth the sting of making his way into his chair for the first time in nearly three months to go have a look. Later will be soon enough to think about it.

“Hurt yourself again?”

Charles wonders, not for the first time, what exactly Erik has been saying to Raven. He’s only really hurt himself twice in all this time, by his count.

She takes his silence as a ‘no’, which it is, and seats herself unceremoniously by his knees. “Have to check your stitches.”

She does so not as carefully as Erik does but not roughly, unwrapping the bandages efficiently then peering at the stitches, “I think they’re supposed to come out soon.”

“Erik’s going to bring Doctor Calker back?”

“Mmhm.”

Not ideal, but probably the best of bad options. Calker can’t really get much more traumatised than he's been already, and Erik seems to have largely accepted leaving Calker alive. Better not to have anyone new involved. Though possibly Charles could remove them himself; something to consider.

Raven wraps the leg again with as little interest as she unwrapped it. Charles is fairly sure that a year ago, she would have been put off by the wound. He was the one who brought her into all this, though, however much he might like to put all the blame on Erik; he hardly has room to blame her for having seen worse now.

When she’s done, she moves on to one of his hands, a little more careful there, thank god. Charles tries not to feel the friction of the bandages moving, though it’s a mostly futile effort. He could ask about the box, but Raven probably doesn’t know what anything in it is. Easier to stick to banal questions that she won’t answer. “How have things been for you?”

A shrug with tiny, bristling black-blue feathers.

“Nothing new?”

She looks up to glare at that, then back down, places the bandage carefully on the side table, reaches for a fresh wound pad.

“No boyfriends?”

And that—that gets a response. Or—a response is perhaps overstating it. But there’s something in her face. Charles tilts his head a little until he can sort of see the front of hers, bent unnecessarily over his burns. “Anyone I know?”

She begins to glare, then looks down again as though he might see the answer in her face. “None of your business.”

He prods some more, but she finishes the hand quickly, and when she moves on to the other hand, Charles stops trying. He could get her to answer, probably, if he kept at it. He’s not sure why he doesn’t. Or—he is, but. It’s silly, so. He’ll ask again next time. When the little irrational bits and corners of his thoughts aren’t being—irrational.

She leaves with a very curt goodbye, food and water on the side table, the massive box on the not-really-dining table and the cart manoeuvred back out the hole-door. Charles watches her until the door closes. Someone he knows? Well. There are lots of people he knows. And it’s annoying that his sister won’t share even this with him now, but it hardly matters. It’s not going to be the worst choice she makes, at this point. And beyond that it shouldn’t matter to him, really. Doesn’t. As long as she’s safe and happy. If there’s any chance of that now. With whatever Erik has going on wherever he and Raven and Azazel and whoever else are. And really, all of that, whatever they’re doing out there, makes who Raven might or might not be—involved with—very insignificant. So it doesn’t matter. Not at all.

The chair is too far from the bed for him to even think about trying to get into it. Stupid, forgetting to ask Raven to move it closer. He’s probably not ready yet, anyway. Charles watches the hours pass on the clock, and switches on the hour—an hour in one tourist’s mind, an hour in another, until it’s too late and they drive away and fade, slowly—and then an hour watching the sea, an hour watching the sky.

***

It’s two days after the fifth time she visits—uneventful, except for a scathing comment when she complains about the chill and Charles suggests that she put on some clothes—that Charles asks, when his skin barely stings but still pushes him away from his chair (and when did it become his chair?), the threat of sliding in and out, the lines in the healing that still line up to parts of the frame, the arms, the seat; when the question’s been camping on his lips long enough to trump his not insubstantial frustration with himself that he still _cares_.

“Have you been having sex with my sister?”

Erik is behind him, sort of, leaning back against the top of the bed, the never-the-same-shape steel backboard, while Charles sits forward. He’s rubbing something godly into the burns at the back of Charles’s neck, because it has proven not possible for him to do it himself and remain balanced, and because Erik is still a little afraid of losing Charles to his own mind, or Charles thinks that he is, as far as he can tell, with only the usual five senses to go on.

Erik’s hands stop moving. “What?”

Charles offers a small shrug, half a stretch into Erik’s palms. “She was attracted to you, when we were all living at Westchester. I can’t see that that’s likely to have changed.”

“She’s your _sister_ , Charles.”

“And a very attractive young woman.”

Erik is staring, Charles thinks. “No. I have not been sleeping with your sister.”

Charles frowns contemplatively; nods noncommittally, for Erik’s benefit. Deliberately does not consider, for the moment, whether it is within the bounds of sanity to be pleased—or, worse, relieved. Then Erik is no longer entirely behind him—leaning forward with the ease of wholeness and muscle mass, pulling Charles back a little with a probably unconscious hand on his shoulder that Charles tries not to let make him unsteady, repositioning them so easily to peer something like suspiciously at the side of Charles’s head. “Where is this coming from?”

Charles shrugs his free shoulder, not-quite-smiles mildly.

“Charles.”

“We were good together.”

“We’re still good together.” Erik frowns, shifts a bit, sits back again, resumes rubbing in the burn cream. “We just disagree on—everything—right now.”

Charles twists to look back over his shoulder. “You’re my jailer, Erik.”

He doesn’t try to argue, at least. “We disagree on things, for now. That doesn’t mean that one day…we’re still good together, Charles. Even if that’s hard for you to see right now.”

Charles resists the urge to roll his eyes, because he doesn’t do that. Much. But even Erik cannot be oblivious to the fact that things between them are not as they were. No. Perhaps Erik most of all, Erik who has barely had friends let alone anything else, would never be oblivious to that. Without the certainty of understanding another’s thoughts to support his choices, however, Charles has been finding that it is always best to take the more drastic gambit. “So it doesn’t bother you at all that we haven’t had sex since last October?”

Erik makes a quite remarkably almost-convincing show of not being discomfited by this line of discussion. “You can’t,” he manages matter-of-factly. “And anyway—I’m not thick, Charles. As you pointed out, I’m keeping you from leaving here. And I’m wearing the helmet. My version of it. We disagree on things. So.”

“I can too.”

Erik looks almost endearingly lost.

“And I’m virtually still in my twenties and it’s been ten months,” and Charles is sick of thinking about this, “and you’re horribly attractive and I’m madly in love with you, even if I do very nearly want to kill you. ‘We disagree on things’ only goes so far, I’m afraid. Even the bloody helmet. Though I can only just believe I’m saying that.”

Confused is Charles’s favourite of Erik’s faces, just because it isn’t so certain, and sometimes, somewhere in the lack of certainty there is almost space for all the rest of life, the things Erik refuses to let in or out—or Charles can’t help feeling that there might be, that there could be, one day.

“Are you asking me to have sex with you?”

It’s probably horrifying, and Charles supposes he would probably—certainly—have felt sick at himself about it a month or two ago, let alone the months before that, but—it’s Erik, and Erik means well, even when he is horrifying, and Charles loves him, even when he hates what he does, and Charles really quite desperately wants not to be awkwardly experimenting with his changed body alone at night and trying more awkwardly still to pretend not to be attracted to Erik every time he comes by. He’s gotten through the wall now, done what he failed at the first time, achieved what he's been aiming for all this time—and he’s still here. There’s no ‘getting through’ the desert. There's no plan B, at least for now. He could be here longer than he’s ever really considered. He could be here a long time. Not that he has to think about that. Not now. Not when it just complicates everything. But…it’s not like sex has to endorse Erik’s behaviour. He can make that clear, surely.

Charles licks his bottom lip, not nervously, mostly. “I suppose I am, yes.”

Erik straightens a little—automatically adjusts his half-grip on Charles as the movement moves him too, where Erik's hands have stopped solid and heavy on one shoulder blade, on the junction of one shoulder and neck—hesitates, then leaves Charles’s whole weight on one of his hands, broad and a little warm in the centre of Charles's back, lifts the other to take one of Charles’s hands in his own, lifts it so slowly to his lips. Charles breathes in slow and very deep. God but it’s good to feel Erik’s lips on his skin.

“Charles, I—I still don’t understand. Your body. How…?”

Erik’s physical arousal is becoming obvious, trousers beginning to tent not a foot to the left of Charles’s hip. Charles makes a valiant, if probably futile effort not to be jealous. Instead, with a somewhat discouraging amount of effort, he twists his body around to lie partially over Erik, propped weirdly against his torso, legs very tangled. It is terribly awkward, and Charles really, really wants to press a knee between Erik’s legs and take some control of this situation and that he can’t is a little bit devastating, in the way that minor realisations and momentary frustrations can be. But Erik slides his hands, his massive, god his hands are massive hands down Charles’s back, strong and firm and sure until they go beyond feeling, and then the strange but not unfamiliar now sensation of being physically moved without being able to physically feel the touch, and again, awkward, and difficult, Charles’s hands pressed to Erik’s chest, one on a shoulder, on the pillow behind, back to a shoulder—to stop him face-planting into Erik, and Erik manoeuvring with both hands and both arms and possibly his knees as well, and probably ignoring his erection altogether, which Charles will have to fix because Erik will not just stay cool and controlled, Charles won't have it, but—and then the awkwardness is mostly mended, and Charles is perched, mostly stably, in Erik’s lap, legs propped limply on either side but the parts that matter, the things he can still feel—chest to chest, face to face. And when he thinks about it, though he can’t really tell, he is probably, judging by Erik’s face, sitting more or less over Erik’s cock.

Charles smiles, half a smile, almost, almost the old smirk. Erik’s lips part just a little—and he shivers, rather brilliantly. Charles smirks a little more. “This could work, you know.”

Erik looks—serious, mostly, but that’s not unusual. His thumbs are pressing even curves down Charles’s back just above where feeling disappears, firm then soft then firm, and it’s sort of sweet that Erik knows where the feeling disappears, even if it is his fault. It’s awkward again now, a bit, but Charles doesn’t do embarrassed, or not often, and least of all with Erik, least of all when Erik's giving him a real, helpless _reaction_ for the first time in too long.

If Erik’s working toward saying something, it’s not coming fast. Charles reminds himself once, firmly, that he doesn’t do embarrassed. He meets Erik’s eye mostly to prove it. “I can. Have sex. You shouldn’t assume.”

And now Erik mostly looks exasperated, but Charles can see him trying. “Oh?”

“The way I’m given to understand it…there’s a part of—sexual pleasure—that’s to do with—well, that’s to do with one’s cock, in a direct sort of way.”

It is probably a testament to Erik’s general unshakability that he has returned to mostly looking serious.

“Then there’s another part that’s to do with other things, other parts of the body, or—mental things, or emotional things—but that are processed through that part of the body, through nerves there. And then there’s another part that has nothing to do with that part of the body at all. So, even though I can’t feel anything—below the waist, or not far below—there are…types of pleasure…that have nothing to do with that. And I have’t entirely lost all of the nerve function—that sort of thing, in the general area, either, I think—Calker described a—range of scenarios to me, back when—early on…and I’ve—experimented, shall we say. And I can’t…I can’t get an erection anymore…but I can feel other things in quite a range of different ways, and—well, you wouldn’t expect it to be the same without…but I can still experience orgasm, I think, in a different way. And I’ve only tried to mess around on my own, so with someone else…well, I mean, it’s still sex. Different, but…” 

“I love you. You know that, don’t you?”

The impression is that Charles’s eyes widen but they don’t really, so much as his face just stops mid-animated-explanation, eyes clear and earnest and lips just pursed, a bit, like he’d forgotten there was an audience to his musing, though Charles never forgets his audience, even for a moment—though perhaps that is different now, with his most powerful sense blocked out.

Charles thinks about the words for a moment, because it’s important, and because he is oh so very aware of walking a line now between affection and approval, and because everything takes more thought without the thoughts of others to back it up. It only takes a moment and when he’s done, he purses his lips a little more, but doesn’t really frown. “You make it hard to believe, sometimes.”

“I know.”

Charles nods. “I do know, though.”

The shiver up his spine of the hard line of one of Erik’s thumbs, pressing firm just above the scar and up and over each vertebra to just below where the shadow of the burns begins.

Erik is almost smiling, honestly, without cynicism, rare as that is. “I would never have imagined, in a thousand years, that there might be a man in the world who would—let _me_ help him in this, to start with, but—who could lie here and—explain the ways and means of his sex to me, utterly unashamed…” Erik shakes his head. “You stand before the world and dare it to reject you. You make it impossible to be ashamed, Charles. I have loved that in you from the first day I met you.”

And Erik’s smile, if Charles is honest with himself, is frightening, a little, without the vast needing vulnerability in his thoughts to soften it. Erik’s smile, when it appears, is always wild and metal and possessive—but Charles has always known that, maybe even always wanted it—the being wanted as much as the being needed, because he has been needed before, at times, but he was never wanted, not really, not since he was so young, not by a person, as a person.

So Charles lets Erik keep his balance for him, and raises one hand to trace Erik’s smile with his fingertips, to take it for himself and possess it right back. He asks with every expectation that Erik will tell him, and tell him honestly, because the only thing that is forgivable about the helmet—or headpiece—is that its purpose has only ever been to stop him doing the things he never wanted to do but would have to, if he could—never to stop him hearing. “What are you thinking?”

And Erik’s smile broadens, a little, sharp and honest, and he lets Charles touch and waits for him to drop his hand again before he answers, “When your burns are healed, if it is really what you want, then I will find every possible way to touch you and fuck you and take you until you cannot say a word without me. And you will beg me to let you finish, and I will, in every way any _doctor_ has ever thought of," disgust unsubtle but unimportant, "and maybe some they haven’t. And then you will fall asleep and leave me to clean us up, and I’ll wipe myself off your skin, and when the sun rises, we’ll wake up and do it again. Does that sound right?”

Charles reminds himself several forceful times that 50% of the skin he can still feel is covered in burns.

Erik’s smile falls (irritatingly) effortlessly into a smirk.

Charles reminds himself that the burns thing matters, and that he actually cares.

It’s tough.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thanks for sticking with me, guys :)
> 
> Also, how excited are you for the new movie. Oh my god.
> 
> Note: Charles's understanding of sexual possibilities post- his injury are my best efforts at research, muddled by the fact that Charles is summarising things he was told most of a year previously and adding his own haphazard observations. It's something that, as I understand it, varies a great deal from one injury and one person to another, and my understanding is superficial at best (and worse now, as I drafted this a year ago :P). I'm trying to capture some of the emotions that I saw in first person accounts and that medical sources discuss, but through the lens of Charles's unique circumstances, somewhat-but-not-really distance from the event, and general hot and cold, all guns blazing (or not), keep pushing 'til you get what you want and if it's not working, do something crazy approach to life. So - don't take as gospel, it's definitely not ;) Thoughts are always welcome :)
> 
> Warnings (from the top note!): not actually Stockholm Syndrome because Charles's brain and thoughts and emotions don't work the same way as other people's (everything changes when you've seen the inside of someone's head...), but more or less the same triggers. Charles reinitiating a sexual relationship with Erik despite his ongoing captivity, and despite knowing that he would in the recent past have seen his own actions as perverse. He's Charles, he sees people differently, he knows what he wants. But if you have trouble with Stockholm S stories, tread carefully.


	17. Chapter 17

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thanks as always (I feel really repetitive lol but I mean it!) for comments/chatting with me last chapter :) I'm going to do my best to keep rolling with these X'D
> 
> Minor gendered violence warning in the end note if relevant for you :)

When the ‘Brotherhood’ makes it to live television the second time, it’s the fifth of September and Hank doesn’t sit when Sean calls him in to see.

“Kids, go upstairs.”

Nine now, nine kids as of more-than-a-week ago, because apparently Erik and Raven still have time in between murdering fleeing people to pluck children from their homes and donate them to Hank.

“Hank—“

“We can watch quietly!” Will protests.

“Now. All of you.” Hank actually plucks two children to their feet by their collars, then pushes another two—very gently—toward the door. “Sean, get Alex from the garden.”

“Yeah, okay, but we can’t just pretend to the kids that it’s not—“

“I’ve got the jet ready. We’re going.”

“…Sorry?”

“I’ve been thinking about this. We can save people from burning houses, sure. Or we can stop Raven and Lensherr and whoever else they’ve dragged into this from killing a whole lot more people. Prove that we’re not all killers.”

“Okay, man, I think you’re forgetting—”

“What? We stopped Shaw, didn’t we? And his power was _impossible_. Much stronger than Erik’s.”

“Okay, see, it was mostly him that stopped Shaw, though.”

“Just get Alex.”

“Hank—”

“I’m going. This is my life now. I can’t pass for normal. I’ll never be able to pass again. I can’t go good-deeding around the neighbourhood. And I don’t want to spend the rest of my life hiding here.”

“Okay, so I’ll get Alex and we can talk—”

“Sean. I’m going. Meet me at the jet in five minutes or I’m going alone.”

***

Alex is at the other end of the orchard with Ari and Aly and Will. They’re looking up when Sean gets close enough to see them through the trees; they’ve heard him coming, because they're not deaf.

He lands at a jog. “You have to come with me, man. Kids, I need you to go back to the house and be really good.”

“Is there another fire?”

“We could help!” Aly pipes up.

“Nah, no fire Will, and I want you all to stay inside. Beast and Alex and I’ll be back later, yeah?”

“Sean, what—”

“I’ll explain when we get there. Ari, Aly, promise me you guys will be good. And stay inside.”

“Where are you—”

“Promise?”

None of the three kids look happy but slowly, Will nods, and the others follow him more than they really answer Sean.

“Alex.”

Alex bends his arms, stiff, strong, tight to his body—like this is something normal, like it ever could be—and Sean folds his arms under, grips Alex’s forearms tightly, and screams.

***

The door to the jet is open, and Hank is nowhere in sight.

“What the hell?”

Alex and Sean are a pile of limbs on the floor of the hanger because Sean’s totally neat at landing now but doing it with someone hanging from his arms is _hard_. He pulls himself to his feet hastily, just misses a collision between his left foot and Alex’s head. “The others were on TV again. Hank wants to go—I don’t know, talk to Raven, or fight them, or something. I dunno. He’s really—”

“Come on!” Hank is leaning out the door. “I’m taking off, guys.”

“What are you going to _do_ , dude?” Alex pulls himself to his feet looking somewhere between livid and just disbelieving.

“I’m going to ask Raven what she’s doing. I’m going to ask Erik what’s happened to Charles. I’m going to—stand in the way or something!”

“Okay, no. No way. Hank, come down here.”

“Don’t try to stop me.” Hank disappears from the doorway, which is not a good sign.

“Oh fucking bloody fuck—” but Alex is storming toward the jet. Sean follows.

The door begins closing itself behind them.

“Hank! Lensherr’s out of his mind. Raven’s pretty obviously lost it too. They’re not on our side anymore!”

“We don’t have a side if we won’t fight.”

The jet shifts from sort of buzzing to sort of rumbling.

“Okay,” Sean tries very hard to sound calming. “But we can’t fight someone who can throw walls and cars and buildings and stuff at us. Not right now, at least. Maybe, I don’t know, if we think about it some more—"

“Sit down. We’re taking off.”

“Hank!”

But the jet is moving, and Sean pulls Alex down into a seat because it’s a stupid plan, but so is getting themselves knocked unconscious when the jet takes off.

“Don’t you fucking take this thing off the ground!”

“Okay, dude, seatbelt—"

“Hank! I swear to god I will put a hole in your head!”

Sean leans over and just does Alex’s seatbelt himself. He gets his own locked in about four seconds before the plane leaves the ground.

***

The series of words Hank yells as they take off is moderately familiar now; this is the third time, counting the very first.

Alex is out of his seat the moment Hank calls “Stabilised!”

“Turn around.”

Hank shakes his head almost childishly. “You showed me. We can do this.”

“I pulled some kids out of a fire, you fucking nutcase! Lensherr is going to jerk this big metal bird out of the sky and smash us to pieces.”

“It’s not metal.”

“We’re all going to die, and the kids—what?”

Hank shrugs. “The jet’s not metal. I rebuilt it.”

“Shit,” Sean manages.

“Thanks Sean.”

Alex glares. “So he’ll drop a building on us. Same ending.”

“Erik doesn’t hate us. He’s still sending us kids to look after.”

“Yeah, I think that’ll change if we try to stop him ending CIA bastards.”

Hank doesn’t turn around, because he’s flying a plane, but his fists tighten on the controls. “You agree with him, then? You think it’s okay for him to slaughter people by the building?”

“Of course he doesn't—”

Alex cuts Sean off. “Don’t even try, Beast.”

“Or do you think that’s how we get people to stop hating us.”

“There are three of us. He’s got, what, twenty? And Sean can’t fight.”

“I _can_ —”

“If we can’t prove that not _all_ mutants spend their time killing people, it won’t just be twenty people against us. It’ll be the whole world.”

“People won’t care that we’re not with Lensherr’s loonies. They won’t, Hank. Listen to me.”

“We have to try.”

“We can try another day.”

“When?” Sean’s almost surprised to hear his own voice.

“What?

Sean shrugs. “When. What other day?”

Alex looks sort of like he might be considering blowing a hole in the plane. “I don’t know. Any day! Next time!”

“But how will that be different?” Hank.

Sean bites his lip. “There’ll be more of them by next time. And more people will be dead. I mean—what do we tell the kids if we turn around? We went to stop them killing people but decided not to?”

Alex looks at him—looks at Hank—looks back at Sean. “You’re both fucking lunatics.”

“You never know,” Hank adds, “Maybe some of the people Erik’s got don’t really want to fight. The kids don’t, and he found them. Maybe some will side with us.”

“Because it will be immediately apparent when we land that they should consider that,” Alex grits out.

“We don’t have to fight them, as such, I guess,” Sean reasons. “We can just…you know, sort of—stand in the way. Say we don’t want them to kill people.”

“Kill me now.”

“No, seriously! ‘Cause I can fly, and Hank’s, like, a tank. And you can blow things up if anyone throws something at you, or, like—I mean, you don’t want to hurt people, sure, but you could, like, fire a warning shot at the ground and then most people wouldn’t even try, you know?”

Alex swallows.

“Come on, Alex.” Hank is still looking straight ahead, and his voice is very deep, and very even but perhaps it sounds just a little like he’s pleading, as best his voice can now. “This is what we set out to do, isn’t it?”

“When?”

Hank shrugs. “When Charles found us. We were going to help people. Save the world.”

“Okay, that was not anything like this.”

“It wasn’t so different,” Sean shrugs, then has to laugh.

“You’re mad.”

Sean reaches out one hand—not really even tentatively, because the worst Alex will do is punch him and hey, that’s happened more than once before—and he never hits hard. He touches Alex’s arm, and Alex doesn’t punch him. “Please, man. We need you. It’s all three of us. Together. Yeah?”

Out the front of the cockpit, the world is speeding by like something from a film, or a crazy nightmare.

Alex swallows again. Sean’s hand is very warm on his arm. It’s not like he’s going to let them go out and get killed while he hides under one of the seats.

“Yeah. Sure.”

Hank thumps the control panel with one hand. Sean whoops not very quietly. Alex shakes his head, and knows he’s only smiling because he’s probably about to die.

“Fucking lunatics.”

***

They touch down in the middle of the chaos, because the chaos is in the middle of the city so there’s nowhere else to land. By the time they make it out the door, Erik is there, Azazel at his shoulder.

For several long seconds, they all just stare at one another—less because it’s a dramatic face-off and more because none of them are so much words people.

It’s Erik who speaks—not much, but. “Boys. Here to help?”

Hank, thank god, steps forward. “You’re killing people.”

“Yes.” Erik’s smile is cool. “The same people who are trying to kill you, in fact.”

“We saw your last—thing,” Sean counters. “You were smashing people who were running away.”

“It’s easy to look innocent when you’re beaten.”

It’s Alex—perhaps not surprisingly—who takes the step and comes down to the ground. “This is bullshit. Whatever you’re playing at, it’s not going to work. You’re turning the world against us, and they’re going to come for you, and we’ll all be fucked.”

That, perversely, broadens ‘Magneto’’s smile, just a little. “You should be with us, Alex. You understand the truth. The world is turning on us. And you, I think, know how quickly and how cruelly that can happen.”

“Yeah fuck off. Where’s Raven? And Xavier?”

Whatever Magneto—Erik—but it’s not, it’s Magneto—might have said to that, it’s lost. In that moment, there’s a scream, and another, then a crowd of screams—god knows how many, too many, so many—and Sean exchanges a glance with Hank, still on the few steps from the door, and in a high keen of noise springs into the sky.

Magneto watches him disappear behind the bulk of the jet. “If he gets in the way, my people may harm him. You’d best go call him back.”

“We won’t let you kill innocent people.” Hank clunks down the stairs like a small giant until he looms at Alex’s side.

“I won’t let you stop me.”

“You’ll have to go through us.” Hank sounds brave—Hank sounds terrified. Alex loves him, and wants to kill him.

“I don’t want to hurt you, Hank. Or you, Alex. We should be brothers. We have the same things to fight for.”

Alex wants to kill Hank, and Sean, and definitely bloody Lensherr. But Hank was right. “No,” he says—and for the first time, maybe in his life, he feels absolutely certain that this is where he _has_ to be. “We don’t.”

What happens next happens in less than a breath, barely more than a thought—Erik is so much stronger than he ever was before, honed by practice, fuelled by fury and the clarity of a crusade. The car he flings into the air behind his back has warped into a weirdly flapping, bursting sheet curving hemispherically as it hurtles toward them—and then it’s gone, and Alex and Hank are running under the nose of the plane as Erik draws the million tiny shards of it back together.

“He wasn’t trying to kill us!” Hank yells, still bolting. “I think he was just—”

“Trapping us, yeah, I don’t give a shit!”

It’s all in front of them now. The news camera could be anywhere in this chaos, Alex thinks, distantly, disconnectedly, but this is what it was showing.

Most of the damage is done, really—it had already well and truly started, of course, by the time the news broke on television, and it’s been—fifteen? Twenty minutes, since then? There’s another big square building with one side mostly missing—more piles of pieces of wall, more bodies—but still people running.

The unmistakable keen of Sean bursting into the sky pulls their focus in, and there he is—with a wildly struggling, grey-suited man dangling awkwardly from his arms. On the ground, someone in a truly appalling orange suit is gesturing incomprehensibly at Sean disappearing with what must, surely have been his next victim. Alex wonders what orange-suit’s power is—but it doesn’t matter. Sean is disappearing behind the undamaged city block behind them—he’s getting the survivors out, bloody hell—and Alex can’t fly people out but he can sure as hell show these stupid fucking people exactly what he thinks of their grand whatever-this-even-is plan.

***

Hank watches, vaguely, as Alex blasts a crater at the feet of someone in a purple cape. Only vaguely, though, because mostly he’s watching Raven.

She’s blue, naked, standing like she owns this hell, shouting something he can’t hear at the green-clad woman from the tv last time, off in the other direction at someone he thinks might be Riptide, spinning to make some gesture or signal he doesn’t understand at the guy in the orange suit who was yelling at Sean and who’s now running toward her.

She looks beautiful, if not as she did, and broken, and completely mad.

Hank starts toward her.

***

He’s right there before she notices him—there are people everywhere—but she turns around when his shadow falls on her and there’s the fierceness on her face, a moment, then surprise and it transforms her, the absence of that rage.

Hank tries to remember that he’s more than seven feet tall. “Raven.”

Raven looks to each side of her, like she’s not quite sure what’s going on—and then looks back at him, gold eyes strange and round, and _looks_. “You’re here.” A breath. “You’ve come to join us?”

The—hope?—in her voice almost, almost makes Hank want to say yes, just for a moment. And then the moment passes, and they’re surrounded by bodies and rubble and hate and it’s all he can do to pretend to stay calm. “You’re killing people.” He shakes his head—he’s doing this in the wrong order. “No. No, I’m not—look around you, Raven. You’ve killed people.”

Her eyes narrow. “Yeah. I’ve killed people who are trying to kill me. And you. This is who we _are_ , Hank, no matter how much you want to run from it.”

“Look, I get you’re angry, I screwed up, but look at me, I’m paying the price for that—”

“You screwed up? You—seriously? You are so full of yourself!”

Hank sets his jaw and ignores that. “Raven, I get it, you like being blue, that’s fine, that’s cool, but that doesn’t make it okay to kill everyone else!”

“God, how stupid are you?” The look on her face says she’d like to kill him, too. “You think I’m fighting because you were a bitch about your stupid racist cure shot? We are _protecting_ you. And ourselves, and _everyone_. We’re protecting our kind, Hank. These people—” her gesture is broad, vague—horrifyingly all-encompassing—“want to kill us. The people we’ve killed here are trying every day to find us and kill us.”

“You don’t know that.”

“Why are you here?”

“To stop you, Raven! This isn’t you! Look around!”

“No way. No. Way.” She actually snarls. “I can’t believe you, you—go home.” The openness—the sense of a person inside the armour—falls away as quickly as it appeared. “Get out of here.”

“Raven.”

“If you won’t fight, then get out of the way.”

He grabs her before he thinks about it, because she’s walking away and this _can’t_ be it—grabs her by the shoulders and spins her back to face him, and then has no idea what else he can say that might do any good at all.

“Let go of me. Now.”

Hank hopes wildly that he doesn’t look as panicked as he feels. “No.”

The change is too quick to follow down the length of her body—her shoulders are suddenly twice as broad, no longer blue, her biceps suddenly stretching Hank’s massive hands—then she’s smaller than before, child small, almost slipping away but Hank’s reflexes are quicker now, so much quicker—then her arms double in size again, and Hank feels the muscles in his hands protest at the sudden strain but whatever this is, whatever it could possibly mean, he’s _not_ letting go—and then her skin ripples again, and she’s blue and pebbled and still and furious.

“One advantage of being—a giant blue beast,” Hank quips very, very lamely.

Raven kicks him in the knee, hard.

Hank curses, and buckles a little, but doesn’t fall, even when she follows it up with the other.

“Help!” Her voice is high and wild. “‘Zazel! Azazel! ‘Zazel!”

“Raven, I’m not hurting you. Just listen to me.”

“Help!”

“Come on, Raven, please—”

“Let go of me.”

“I know you, Raven—”

“Help!”

“You’re a good person. I know you’re a good person. You’re not a killer!”

And then there is a knife pressing into his throat. He knows this partly because he can feel something at his throat, but mostly because the voice behind him says, “I will cut your throat, Beast, if you do not take your hands from her.”

The voice is deep and oddly accented, and the hand holding the unseen knife is red.

“You’re seriously teaming with Azazel? Don’t you remember the things he did?”

Raven’s glare is very cold. The knife digs in uncomfortably—it shouldn’t draw blood, though. Hank knows the thickness of this skin.

“You can’t have forgotten. You screamed and hid and then tried to run. He was outside slaughtering the people trying to protect us. He stabbed people and laughed. Dropped people out of the sky. Hell, you saved me from him in Cuba. He’s a monster, Raven.”

“They’re the monsters.”

“You’ve seen him—”

“I screamed, you’re right. While he killed the same people who betrayed us and tried to kill us once they’d done using us.”

“Okay, that doesn’t even make sense, he killed them, they can’t then betray—”

“Azazel and I are fighting for our freedom. Now let. Me. Go.”

The knife presses in again—enough to hurt, enough to really hurt—and there’s no point. Hank lets go.

Raven spits at his feet. “I don’t have to explain myself to you.”

And then there’s a burning shudder of heat behind him, and the knife at his neck and the person behind him are gone.

“Beast!”

Azazel is in front of him, at Raven’s side, and then there’s a flash of red light—Alex—and they’re both gone. Alex’s blast hits an already-blackened truck behind where they were standing a moment ago.

Hank is still staring at the space when Alex reaches his side.

“Alright, Beast?”

Hank shakes his head—blinks. “You got Azazel off me.”

“Yeah. Sorry, just saw you.”

Hank looks back over his shoulder, very belatedly. “You could have hit me.”

“Yeah, well I didn’t, did I? Don’t be a fuckwit, I knew my shot was good. I don't hit people.”

Hank glances around again. Raven and Azazel are somewhere out of sight—perhaps on the other side of the jet.

Alex looks too. “I think they’re retreating.”

“They’re probably just behind the jet, or one of the buildings.”

“What?”

Hank looks around again, then finally back to Alex. “Azazel. With Raven. They’re probably just behind something.”

Alex raises one eyebrow so far it sort of distorts his face. “Not them, dumbass. The lot of them. They’re retreating. I don’t think they want to fight us. Thank bloody god, since you’re useless and all Sean can do is run rescues.”

Hank looks around, then—properly, not just looking for blue and red skin. Alex is right. There are far fewer outlandish costumes than before—and far fewer grey suits, some probably just fled, others carried off by Sean. There’s still the carnage of the battle, but the living people are mostly gone. There’s a woman in what looks like weird metal armour still walking purposefully toward one corner of the building, and Alex points that way, nudges Hank, and starts heading in her direction—but then she stops—turns around and starts walking away. Sure enough, barely ten steps and Azazel appears, then disappears, the armoured woman in tow, within a second. Hank and Alex aren’t even halfway to where she stood.

The rubble is still.

Two heads pop up from behind a chunk of concrete—look around—then see Hank, and disappear again behind the rough cover.

Hank sighs.

When Sean comes back into hearing, and then sight, Hank waves his arms like a big blue beacon ’til Sean diverts from the men behind the rock and comes to land with his friends.

“What’s up? There’s still a couple—”

“They can walk out. The others have gone.” Hank isn’t entirely sure of this, but it’s either that or they’re all doing another doom and despair press conference behind the jet or the building or something.

“Huh?”

“Lensherr’s group.” Alex says this like it’s the deepest possible insult. “They’re out. Didn’t want to fight us.” He pauses to glare at Hank. “Or, didn’t want to fight _me_. Hank was making puppy eyes at Raven.”

“So…we won?”

Hank looks around again at the remains of the building, the—ten? Twenty, maybe, even?—bodies mangled on the ground. “I don’t know that I’d say that.”

“But, I mean—they’re gone. The people I pulled out, and the ones still here, they’re safe.”

Alex shrugs. “Guess so. For now.”

“Huh.” Sean nods a few times; sucks on the inside of his lip. “Huh.”

Alex takes a deep breath—looks around once more at the mess, and tries not to figure out which blackened rubble is his blasting and which is Lensherr’s or Riptide’s or one of the others. It doesn’t matter. His are the ones that didn’t kill people. His are the ones that stopped them killing people.

Hank is staring blankly into the distance; Sean is looking sceptically at Hank. Alex sighs. “Okay. Let’s go home.”

***

The other two are stepping into the jet when Alex spins around. There’s no one there. But he was sure—then there it is, the top of a head and something else bobbing above a piece of fallen wall.

Alex steps down from the little stair. “Hello?”

Nothing.

“You, behind the rubble. Got a problem?”

There’s another beat of stillness—then the head emerges again, hair and then a face and then shoulders beneath it.

Alex raises an eyebrow. “Hi.”

The man—sandy haired, short, tight curls, maybe thirty—looks petrified.

Then he pops up a little further, and Alex realises the ‘something else’ that he saw was a camera.

“You’re a tv guy?”

The man nods once, then several times more.

“Okay.” Alex grits his teeth—tries to clear his head enough to be sure. “Okay.” He half turns, not enough for the man to leave his sight. “Banshee! Beast! Get back out here!”

He hears them scramble behind him. The cameraman is still staring.

Alex looks at him hard for one more moment, then tries. “How much did you see?”

Sean and Hank bolt down the stairs, then stop at the bottom, clearly expecting a fight rather than one guy half-hiding behind a wall.

The cameraman’s eyes keep flicking their way—to Hank, presumably. He coughs. “Um. Got called in when it all. Got—some of the—mutants—on film—lot of people dying. But. Um. I thought—I saw you—save a guy. You—shot? at one of the terrorists?”

It feels, weirdly, like every muscle in his body relaxes, breathes out, and tightens to a stretched string at the same time.

Sean and Hank step forward, to either side of him. “Yep,” Sean confirms, _way_ too casually, but—that’s Sean. “He saved a bunch of people. And I can fly, so I carried a bunch of people out of here and over behind the next block where there’s no fighting. We saw last time on the TV, and those guys being killed running away, so I wanted to help them get away fast and safe. And my friends wanted to help defend people. So we did.”

The camera is on now—there are lights blinking, and that could mean anything, but before it was down by the guy’s side and now it’s on his shoulder, pointing right at them, so Alex is pretty sure.

Then the guy steps out from behind the bit of wall—still terrified, probably, and his hands are shaking—but he doesn’t stutter when he asks them, “Who are you?”

Alex grabs Sean’s wrist before he can say anything stupid. “This is Banshee. And this is Beast. And—” and fuck, he really, really hates the name: havoc—or ‘havok’, someone insisted a lifetime ago when the names were a dumb game—like a natural disaster, a murder spree, the mess families lock in the basement or the attic and try not to think about. But—but they have code-names for a reason now, and maybe his real name _could_ make someone recognise him on tv and somewhere, though he hasn’t seen them in—years—he has two brothers who don’t deserve to be hunted down by people looking for him. And havoc isn’t…it doesn't quite mean chaos. Kids and idiots and animals cause chaos. What he wants to do to Lensherr and his loonies isn’t chaos. His _thing_ , his…energy, his weapon, it’s targeted now; it’s not chaos anymore. And neither is he. He’s something more…focused. More direct. And maybe that’s what the name has said all along, even if it took him a while to—grow into it. “I’m—Havok,” he says. Havoc isn’t something that happens to people, like chaos. Havoc—or Havok—is something you wreak. “And we’re—mutants. Yeah. But most mutants are good people. Not like the ones—in the ‘Brotherhood’. We want people to know that most mutants are decent people.”

The look on the cameraman’s face says holy crap, and says he’s going to have a heart attack, and says he’s going to get a big promotion and hey, good on him. He doesn’t stop looking through the camera lens to ask—“So you’re not from the Brotherhood of Mutants? Where are you from?”

And Alex opens his mouth to say no, bloody hell, we’re not from the ‘Brotherhood’, clearly, like I just said, but Hank gets there first, hand landing heavy on his shoulder, and says—

“We’re the X-Men.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Tada! XD
> 
> Warnings (from top): Hank physically prevents Raven from walking away from him; he doesn't hurt her and she probably doesn't actually feel threatened, but he does physically hold her by the arms/shoulders, facing him at arm's length, to keep her there while she tries to get away. I.e. using physical strength to try to force a conversation. If that's uncomfortable for you, skip the section that starts with Hank being noticed by Raven; rest of chapter should be fine :)


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